WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court declared Thursday that President Bush overstepped his authority in the war against terrorism, ruling that he does not have the power to set up special military trials at Guantanamo Bay without the approval of Congress.

In a 5-3 decision, the high court said the planned military tribunals lack the basic standards of fairness required by the nation's Uniform Code of Military Justice and by the Geneva Conventions.

The ruling is the most sweeping legal defeat for the administration in the five-year-old war on terrorism, and it rejects the president's broad claim that the commander in chief can make the rules during an unconventional war.

Since 1929, the Geneva Conventions have set rules for the conduct of wars and the treatment of prisoners, but Bush and his top advisers had maintained that it did not apply to terrorists.

Still, the practical impact of Thursday's decision may be limited. The court said al-Qaeda suspects could be tried under the rules for courts-martial used by the American military or under new rules passed by Congress.

The ruling does not free any terrorism suspects, nor does it change the status of the several hundred detainees at the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The opinion in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld was delivered by 86-year-old Justice John Paul Stevens, the court's last veteran of World War II, who set forth a view of the Constitution in wartime that stood in sharp contrast to the one put forth by the president and his lawyers. Justices Stephen H. Breyer, Anthony M. Kennedy, David H. Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg agreed.

Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. dissented. Scalia and Thomas took the rare step of reading their dissents in the courtroom. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. took no part in the decision because he was on the U.S. Court of Appeals last year when the issue was considered and voted then to uphold the president's special military trials.

In the decision, Stevens said the Constitution gives Congress the power to make the laws and set the rules for handling wartime captives. It says Congress shall "make rules concerning captures on Land and Water," and also says Congress shall define the "offenses against the law of nations."

Despite those words, Bush contended that as commander in chief of the armed forces, he had the power on his own to decide how terrorism suspects would be held, how they were to be treated, how they would be tried and what offenses amounted to war crimes.

In November 2001, the White House issued an executive order announcing the Pentagon would set up special military commissions to try al-Qaeda suspects. The president said that he did not need the approval of Congress and that the federal courts had no jurisdiction over the cases.

Moreover, the White House said the Geneva Conventions did not apply to terrorists because this was not a conflict between nations and their armies.

No one has been tried and convicted under the new rules, but they were challenged as unfair by Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a one-time driver for Osama bin Laden who was charged with conspiring with al-Qaeda to kill Americans. Hamdan, who was captured in November 2001 and has been held at Guantanamo since June 2002, has admitted he was bin Laden's driver but said he was a $200-a-month hired hand, not a terrorist.

In the sweeping decision, the justices rejected all key assertions made by the president and struck down the military commissions set up by the Pentagon. The court also cast doubt on whether the general charge of conspiracy that Hamdan faces is a war crime.

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