Washington ? In a sharp rebuke, a federal appeals court denied Wednesday a Bush administration request to transfer terrorism suspect Jose Padilla from military to civilian law enforcement custody.

The three-judge panel of the Richmond-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals also refused the administration’s request to vacate a September ruling that gave President Bush wide authority to detain “enemy combatants” indefinitely without charges on U.S. soil.

The decision, written by Judge J. Michael Luttig, questioned why the administration used one set of facts before the court for 3 1/2 years to justify holding Padilla without charges but used another set to convince a grand jury in Florida to indict him last month.

Luttig said the administration has risked its “credibility before the courts” by appearing to try to keep the Supreme Court from reviewing the extent of the president’s power to hold enemy combatants without charges.

Padilla, a former Chicago gang member, was arrested in 2002 at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport as he returned to the United States from Afghanistan. Initially, then-Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft alleged Padilla planned to set off a radiological device known as a “dirty bomb.”

But before federal courts in New York and Virginia, the administration argued that Padilla should be held without charges because he had come home to carry out an al-Qaida backed plot to blow up apartment buildings in New York, Washington or Florida.

Last month, a grand jury in Miami charged Padilla with being part of a North American terror support cell that allegedly raised funds and recruited fighters to wage violent jihad outside the United States.

Administration lawyers immediately asked the appeals court to transfer Padilla from a U.S. military brig in South Carolina to the custody of authorities in Miami.

Luttig said the Supreme Court must sort out Padilla’s fate, either by accepting or rejecting an appeal by his attorneys of the appellate court’s decision in September that the president has the authority to order his detention indefinitely.