Washington ? Promising to protect the United States while adhering to its core human values, President-elect Barack Obama formally unveiled his intelligence team Friday, praising their integrity, management skills and willingness to tell him the truth.

“We must adhere to our values as diligently as we protect our safety with no exceptions,” Obama said.

Obama picked retired Adm. Dennis Blair as the national intelligence director and Leon Panetta to head the CIA.

He called them “public servants with unquestioned integrity, broad experience, and strong managers with the core pragmatism that we need in dangerous times.”

Obama said he has given the men the clear charge to restore the United States’ record on human rights.

“We will abide by the Geneva Conventions. We will uphold our highest ideals,” he said.

Obama said that the country learned “tough lessons” under the Bush administration, and he will demand intelligence assessments “grounded solely in the facts, and not seek information to suit any ideological agenda.”

Blair, a former head of the U.S. Pacific Command, pledged to uphold the standards that Obama articulated “and that the American people have a right to expect.”

Blair won high marks for countering terrorism in southeast Asia after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. He worked closely with foreign partners in crafting offensives that crippled the Jemaah Islamiyah terror faction in Indonesia and the Abu Sayyaf group in the Philippines.

Panetta, a former congressman, White House chief of staff and budget director with no direct intelligence experience, will have the president’s “complete trust and substantial clout,” Obama said.

Panetta said he would work to assuage a Congress bruised from eight years of abrasive relations with the Bush administration and promised “to form the kind of partnership we need if we’re to win the war on terror.”

Obama praised the intelligence professionals working at 16 U.S. agencies even as he criticized the current administration for directing them in harsh interrogation and secret rendition policies.