Washington ? The Supreme Court ruled Monday that the war on terrorism did not give the government a “blank check” to hold a U.S. citizen and foreign-born terror suspects in legal limbo, a forceful denunciation of Bush administration tactics since the 9-11 attacks.

Ruling in two cases, the high court refused to endorse a central claim of the White House: that the government has authority to seize and detain terrorism suspects and indefinitely deny access to courts or lawyers while interrogating them.

A state of war “is not a blank check for the president when it comes to the rights of the nation’s citizens,” Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote in the most significant case of the day, a ruling that gives American-born detainee Yaser Esam Hamdi the right to fight his detention in a federal court.

Separately, the court said that nearly 600 men from 42 countries detained at a Navy prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, could use American courts to contest their treatment. The Bush administration had argued that U.S. courts had no business second-guessing detentions of foreigners held on foreign soil.

The administration’s detention policies have rankled allies overseas and outraged civil liberties and human rights groups at home.

Deborah Pearlstein, director of the U.S. Law and Security Program at Human Rights First, called Monday’s rulings a broad repudiation of the administration’s approach.

“The court said any citizen has a right to due process and that the administration’s position that it has inherent executive authority … to detain people is just wrong under the law.”

The court declined to rule on the merits of a third case arising from the hunt for terrorists. The justices sent back to a lower court the case of Jose Padilla, a former Chicago gang member and a convert to Islam who is being held as an enemy combatant amid allegations he sought to detonate a radiological “dirty bomb” and blow up apartment buildings in the United States.

The administration contends that all the men at issue in Monday’s cases are enemy combatants — neither prisoners of war protected by the Geneva Conventions nor ordinary criminal suspects with automatic rights to see lawyers and know the charges against them.

Donna Newman, attorney for Jose Padilla, speaks to the media outside Manhattan federal court, in New York. The Supreme Court threw out the case of Padilla, a detainee in a major terrorism case, on a technicality, but its rulings Monday shot down the Bush administration's policy on detaining enemy combatants.

All the cases dealt with rights of prisoners, an issue with added resonance since recent revelations that U.S. soldiers abused Iraqi prisoners and used harsh interrogation methods at a prison outside Baghdad.

At oral arguments in the terrorism cases in April, an administration lawyer assured the court that Americans abide by international treaties against torture, and that the president or the military would not allow even mild torture as a means to get information.

The Hamdi ruling is the most significant test so far of executive power in the fight to root out and contain global terrorism. The case included multiple holdings and some unusual alliances among conservative and liberal justices.

Eight justices rejected the administration’s treatment of Hamdi on some grounds. Only Justice Clarence Thomas, by many measures the court’s staunchest conservative, found no fault with the government.

By a vote of 6-to-3, the court placed Hamdi’s case back in the hands of a federal judge, who presumably can rule on whether he should be released.

In the Padilla case Monday, a 5-4 majority led by Chief Justice William Rehnquist voted to throw out the lower court ruling on a technicality. The court’s more liberal wing dissented.

Padilla can refile his case and challenge the government on stronger legal footing, although several lawyers said the government may now choose to file criminal charges instead.

Other decisions

The Supreme Court also took these actions Monday:

l Agreed to consider whether sick people who smoke marijuana on the advice of a doctor can be prosecuted by the federal government.

l Agreed to hear a case raising the question of when governments can tax American Indian property.

l Declined to consider whether a landmark disability law requires that disabled moviegoers get better seats than the front-row seating they’re often given in new stadium-seating theaters; critics say the front row seats force the disabled to awkwardly crane their necks.

l Agreed to hear a lawsuit charging that the CIA didn’t fulfill its pledge of lifetime support to former Eastern Bloc spies living in the United States.