The Bush administration appeared this week to have circumvented what might have become a messy Supreme Court battle over its right to detain indefinitely US citizens it suspects of being terrorists.

By filing criminal charges against Jose Padilla, a US citizen who has been held for three and a half years in a Navy prison without charge as an "enemy combatant" on allegations that he wanted to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb" in the US, the Justice Department said it was making "moot" a potential review of Mr Padilla's case before the highest US court, which was in the process of considering whether or not to take the case.