WASHINGTON, 29 June 2004 — The Supreme Court delivered a mixed verdict yesterday on the Bush administration’s anti-terrorism policies, ruling that the US government has the power to hold American citizens and foreign nationals without charges or trial, but that detainees can challenge their treatment in US courts.

The administration had sought a more clear-cut endorsement of its policies than it got. The White House claimed broad authority to seize and hold potential terrorists or their protectors for as long as the president saw fit — and without interference from judges or lawyers.

In both cases, the ruling was 6-3, although the lineup of justices was different in the two decisions.

Ruling in the case of American-born detainee Yasser Esam Hamdi, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said the court has “made clear that a state of war is not a blank check for the president when it comes to the rights of the nation’s citizens.”

Congress did give the president authority to hold Hamdi, a four-justice plurality of the court said, but that does not cancel out the basic right to a day in court.

The court ruled similarly in the case of about 600 foreign-born men held indefinitely at a US Navy prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The men can use American courts to contest their captivity and treatment, the high court said.

Steven R. Shapiro, legal director of the ACLU, called the rulings “a strong repudiation of the administration’s argument that its actions in the war on terrorism are beyond the rule of law and unreviewable by American courts.”

The court sidestepped a third major terrorism case, ruling that a lawsuit filed on behalf of detainee Jose Padilla improperly named Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld instead of the much lower-level military officer in charge of the Navy brig in South Carolina where Padilla has been held for more than two years.

Padilla must refile a lawsuit challenging his detention in a lower court.

The administration had fought any suggestion that Hamdi or another US-born terrorism suspect could go to court, saying that such a legal fight posed a threat to the president’s power to wage war as he sees fit.

“We have no reason to doubt that courts, faced with these sensitive matters, will pay proper heed both to the matters of national security that might arise in an individual case and to the constitutional limitations safeguarding essential liberties that remain vibrant even in times of security concerns,” Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote in the Hamdi case.