The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that wartime tribunals are not valid under U.S. law or international treaties, a political and legal blow to the Bush administration’s broad claims of executive power.

A computer expert has claimed that he warned police about two of the July 7 bombers nearly two years before the attacks on London, intensifying pressure on the Government to launch a public inquiry into the atrocities.

America yesterday denounced as “a good PR move” the suicides of three terrorism suspects at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp. The comment was made by a senior State Department spokesman who told the BBC World Service that the suicides were “a tactic to further the jihadi cause.”

More than 20 nations - from Central Asia to Western Europe - colluded in a CIA-run “spider’s web” of secret flights and prisons for abducted terrorism suspects that breach European and international human rights accords.

The Pentagon has decidedto omit from new detainee policies a key tenet of the Geneva Convention that explicitly bans “humiliating and degrading treatment,” a step that would mark a further, potentially permanent, shift away from strict adherence to international human rights standards.