WASHINGTON -- Hail to the federal appellate courts. They may save the republic from the Bush administration's excesses in the war on terrorism.

We are beginning to see -- at last -- some judicial courage reflected in court rulings that restrain the president from placing suspects in limbo for months, without access to lawyers or family.

Those decisions may temper the actions of President George W. Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft in their apparent desire to ignore U.S. law and the Geneva Accords dealing with the humane treatment of prisoners of war.

One measure of desperation of prisoners held indefinitely, having been given no reason for their confinement and without contact with courts or family, is that 32 of 600-plus prisoners being held by the U.S. military at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on suspicion of terrorism have attempted suicide.

The suspects from 40 different countries were captured in the Afghan war.

Their treatment has become a black mark on the reputation of the United States as a nation of laws, founded on respect for human dignity.

It is comparable to the shameful internment of 120,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans during World War II.

We're still apologizing and paying off for that unhappy chapter in our history.

On Dec. 18, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, based in New York, ruled that Bush lacked the legal authority to hold indefinitely a U.S. citizen arrested in the United States on suspicion of terrorism by simply declaring him an "enemy combatant."

On the same day, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, based in San Francisco, ruled that the policy of holding non-citizens at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay without access to legal protections was unconstitutional and in violation of international law.

At last, the courts are rising to the challenge of the White House grab for unlimited power.

The New York court told Bush-Ashcroft that American citizenship counts under the Constitution. The San Francisco court told the administration that it cannot deny non-Americans held in Guantanamo access to the U.S. court system.

"We simply cannot accept the government's position that the executive branch possesses the unchecked authority to imprison indefinitely any persons, foreign citizens included, on territory under the sole jurisdiction and control of the United States," the Ninth Circuit court said.

"We hold that no lawful policy or precedent supports such a counter-intuitive and undemocratic procedure," the court added.

The New York ruling dealt with the case of Jose Padilla, an American convert to Islam, who was arrested when he arrived back in the United States from Pakistan.

Ashcroft said in June 2002 that Padilla, a former gang member in Chicago, had planned to explode a "dirty bomb" in the United States and was taking his orders from al-Qaida.

Padilla has been held incommunicado for 18 months at a Navy brig in Charleston, S.C., with no contact with a lawyer or family.

The court said the president doesn't possess "inherent constitutional authority to detain American citizens seized within the United States, away from the zone of combat, as enemy combatants."

It gave the government 30 days to release Padilla or seek other means to hold him in civilian courts.

The two decisions add up to a serious setback for the administration's apparent policy of canceling basic criminal justice when it wants to.

"The Ninth Circuit decision (dealing with the detainees at Guantanamo) said that you can't create a legal black hole in territory controlled by the United States," Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, told The New York Times on Dec. 19.

Chris Dunn, spokesman for the New York Civil Liberties Union, said the decision on the detainees is "a repudiation of the Bush administration's attempt to close the federal courts to those accused of terrorism."

Daniel L. Greenberg, president of the Legal Aid Society in New York, said "among the reasons that defendants are guaranteed fundamental fairness is to test whether the charges against them are true."

We need to have confidence that the right person has been seized and that the events charged had actually occurred, he added.

The administration's campaign to short-circuit due process has riled other nations. The Financial Times on Dec. 31 reported that Johan Steyn, one of Britain's law lord judges, has branded the detentions at Guantanamo "a monstrous failure of justice."

Steyn said the Guantanamo prison represented an attempt to put the prisoners "beyond the rule of law, beyond the protection of any courts and at the mercy of victors."

The U.S. Supreme Court will have the final say later this year on whether the administration has complied with the Constitution and whether government claims of national security outweigh individual civil liberties.

We hope the court's ruling will reflect traditional American values.

(Helen Thomas can be reached at the e-mail address hthomas@hearstdc.com).