Washington ? The Supreme Court should reject the Bush administration’s attitude that it doesn’t “have to account to anyone” in the war on terrorism, a lawyer arguing for detainees held at a U.S. base in Cuba told the high court Tuesday in the first such challenge heard since Sept. 11, 2001.

The Bush administration believes its “actions are absolutely immune from judicial examination” when it comes to the roughly 650 foreign men from more than 40 nations it has jailed at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba, said John Gibbons, a lawyer arguing on behalf of a handful of those detainees.

But Solicitor General Theodore Olson, who argued the case for the government, said more than five decades of litigation were on his side. He said the case did not belong in a U.S. courtroom because foreign “combatants” held at Guantanamo Bay’s Camp X-Ray have no rights and are beyond the reach of American justice by virtue of their incarceration on foreign soil.

This case is the first of three historic controversies playing out before the Supreme Court this week and next. The cases were born of the administration’s actions in the months following the worst terrorist attacks in U.S. history.

They could yield the most important decisions on civil liberties in a time of national insecurity since World War II, testing the president’s powers in wartime and the ability of the courts to intervene if individual rights have been violated.

The court next week will hear arguments in the cases of two U.S. citizens designated by President Bush as “enemy combatants” and held by the military without charges, including former Chicago street gang member Jose Padilla.

While questions raised by the nine justices Tuesday made it difficult to determine how they would ultimately rule in the Guantanamo case, at least four seemed to harbor some reservations about Bush’s actions, either by stating so outright or sharply questioning Olson.

“It seems rather contrary to an idea of a Constitution with three branches (of government) that the executive would be free to do whatever they want — whatever they want — without a check,” Justice Stephen Breyer told Olson at one point.

But Olson, arguing before a packed courtroom, made the administration’s view clear about the current atmosphere with his first six words. “The United States is at war,” he said.

He warned there would be chaos on the battlefield if courts began intervening in the president’s command of military actions.

And despite what Olson called an “extraordinary threat to our national security,” he said lawyers representing the detainees wanted the nation’s highest court “to assert jurisdiction that is not authorized by Congress, does not arise from the Constitution (and) has never been exercised by this court.”

But Gibbons said the White House was using Camp X-Ray to “create a lawless enclave insulating the executive branch from any judicial scrutiny — now or in the future.”