While the administration was braced for a loss in the Padilla and Hamdi cases, it was clearly not prepared for a sweeping, 8-1 defeat. The White House made no comment about the decisions, apparently hoping to bury the news under reports of the early handover of limited sovereignty in Iraq. And it took the Justice Department itself the better of the day to put out a brief statement acknowledging that it would need to "modify existing processes to satisfy the court's rulings."

But it isn't the administration's processes that will need modifying as much as its attitude. In its arguments before the court, the administration claimed that the president has "inherent" authority to detain even U.S. citizens indefinitely. And in its statement Monday afternoon, the Justice Department seemed to suggest that the court had agreed.

It had not. Only Justice Clarence Thomas accepted the administration's primary argument -- that the president, as commander in chief, has the power to declare citizens enemy combatants and keep them in custody indefinitely. O'Connor and her colleagues in the plurality said that the president has detention authority only because Congress has given it to him, and even then that the authority is strictly limited.

While the administration had argued that Hamdi could be held as long as the war on terror continues, the O'Connor plurality seemed to say that he must be released as soon as "active combat" ceases in Afghanistan, where he was captured more than two years ago. And while the administration had argued that Hamdi was entitled to neither an attorney nor a hearing by a neutral judge, the plurality said he is clearly entitled to both.

The contours of such a hearing remain unclear. While the O'Connor Four said that the government may be able to try Hamdi before a military tribunal, that hearsay evidence might be used against him, and that Hamdi -- rather than the government, as is the case in criminal trials -- must bear the burden of proof on guilt and innocence, it's not clear how many justices will accept such a scheme in the end. Souter, Ginsburg, Stevens and Scalia have all signaled that they will not. Thus, it is at least theoretically possible that Hamdi -- and Padilla, who has a stronger case because he was captured in the United States -- will get something close to a criminal trial.

It is less clear what the detainees at Guantánamo Bay will receive. The six justices in the majority did not spell out the sort of "process" to which they are entitled; rather, they held only that U.S. courts must be open to them because they're being held by the United States in a place that is under U.S. control. That holding raises another, potentially much more troubling question for the Bush administration: Do detainees being held at other U.S. facilities -- say, Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan or the Abu Ghraib prison -- also have a right to seek redress from federal courts in the United States?

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