Washington ? The Supreme Court gave a skeptical hearing Wednesday to the Bush administration’s claim that the president and his military commanders may detain American citizens indefinitely, and without a hearing, during the war on terrorism.

The cases of two U.S. citizens, Yaser Esam Hamdi and Jose Padilla, who have been deemed “enemy combatants” and are at a military jail in South Carolina, pose the starkest test yet of how the war on terrorism could rewrite America’s legal rules.

Civil libertarians describe as truly unprecedented the administration’s claim that the president can order American citizens picked up on American soil to be locked away with no right now or in the future to even challenge their detention.

But the administration’s lawyer said that a “ticking time bomb” in the form of a suspected terrorist need not be set free simply because the government does not yet have enough evidence to charge him with a crime.

During Wed-nesday’s hearing, however, most of the justices said the law almost always requires that an imprisoned person be given a hearing at some point to plead his innocence. While enemy soldiers can be captured on the battlefield and held for the duration of the war, the Geneva Convention mandates that the military give them a brief hearing to make sure that they are indeed enemy soldiers.

By contrast, the Bush administration has maintained that “unlawful enemy combatants” may be detained in isolation and indefinitely in a military jail without a chance to speak to a lawyer or to appear before even a military judge.

That seemed to go too far for most of the justices.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg asked: “The person who is locked up — doesn’t he have a right to bring before some tribunal himself (in) his own words” to plead his innocence?

He has “had an opportunity to explain it in his own words during interrogation,” replied Deputy Solicitor General Paul Clement, representing the administration.

Last week, the justices criticized the administration’s refusal to give hearings to the more than 600 foreigners who were picked up overseas and are imprisoned at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The families of some of those men contended that they were neither terrorists nor Taliban fighters and had been given no chance to assert their innocence.

A court decision is expected in June.