WASHINGTON — Ever since Sept. 11, 2001, when terrorists seized four jetliners and caused the deaths of nearly 3,000 people, President Bush has declared that the United States is at war -- and in wartime, presidents assume emergency powers they would not claim in times of peace.
Bush and his aides said they had a right to imprison suspected terrorists, including U.S. citizens, without court hearings. They asserted a prerogative to keep more secrets than before from Congress, the media and the public. And at one point, the Justice Department claimed the president could ignore laws prohibiting torture, under his "inherent authority" as commander in chief.
But in an unusual series of reversals in recent weeks, the Supreme Court, Congress and public opinion all have intervened to draw new limits on the president's wartime authority.
On Monday, the court ruled that the federal government could not hold suspected terrorists indefinitely without allowing them to challenge their detention in legal hearings, a significant setback for the administration.
Earlier this month, the administration was embarrassed by a 2003 memo that claimed a presidential right to override laws regulating torture or, for that matter, any other military conduct. The White House, facing a public-opinion storm, promptly disavowed the policy.
Before that, the administration sought to withhold documents and witnesses from a congressionally created commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, claiming they were sheltered by the right of executive privilege. But after protests from members of both parties in Congress, the administration backed down.
"For a year after 9/11, the executive branch got the benefit of the doubt," said Norman J. Ornstein, a political scientist at the predominantly conservative American Enterprise Institute. "That was the case, for example, when Congress voted to authorize the war in Iraq. But it's not the case anymore."
"Part of it is time passing" since the terrorist attacks, he added. "I couldn't say the court's decisions would have been different if it were, say, three months after 9/11, but they very well might have been."
Douglas W. Kmiec, a Justice Department official in the Reagan administration who is now at Pepperdine Law School, agreed.
"It would have been interesting to know how different the outcome would have been if we had more recently suffered an attack on the homeland," he said. "I do think the 9/11 commission and the furor over the administration's decision-making on interrogation policy affected the court's judgment."
