Under the tactic the court invalidated in the Missouri case, the police first question a suspect while withholding the advice required by the Miranda decision of the right to remain silent and to consult a lawyer before answering questions. In not giving the warnings, the police know that any incriminating statements elicited in this phase of the questioning will be inadmissible in court.

The officers then give the suspect a short break before resuming the interrogation, this time with the warnings. Typically, suspects will waive their Miranda rights and then repeat what they had said earlier, prompted by the officers' leading questions and by the sense that it is now too late to turn back."

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 held at a Navy prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, can 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."

[...]

Conservative Justice Antonin Scalia and liberal Justice John Paul Stevens said if the government had a case against [enemy combatant] Hamdi it should have charged him as a criminal, perhaps even as a traitor. Citizens cannot be held as enemy combatants so long as the usual protections of the Constitution are in force, the pair wrote."