WASHINGTON -- A federal appeals court yesterday reversed a district court ruling that President Bush's warrantless surveillance program was illegal, delivering a major victory to the administration in one of the most significant constitutional disputes to arise in the war on terrorism.

By a 2-to-1 vote, an appeals court in Cincinnati ruled that a group of plaintiffs, led by the American Civil Liberties Union, had no legal standing to challenge the National Security Agency's surveillance program. Because the decision to dismiss the case was based on that legal technicality, the court did not take a position on the legality of the program.

Still, the decision erased the only judicial repudiation of the White House's claim that Bush has the wartime power to bypass a law that forbids the government from eavesdropping on Americans' phone calls and e-mails without a judge's permission. Last August, a federal district judge in Detroit had ruled that the warrantless spying program was illegal and must be shut down.

Moreover, yesterday's decision bolstered the administration's position in this and similar cases that any courtroom discussions of the program would jeopardize "state secrets," and so lawsuits challenging the program must be dismissed -- an argument that the district judge in Detroit had rejected in her ruling last summer...

...ACLU legal director Steve Shapiro called the ruling "deeply disappointing."...

...Last August, District Court Judge Anna Diggs Taylor agreed that they had standing to sue, then ruled that the program was illegal...

...The legal analysis by Taylor -- whom former President Jimmy Carter nominated to the court -- was controversial from the beginning. Many legal specialists on both sides of the NSA surveillance dispute had predicted that her judgment might not stand on appeal.

Some had also predicted that the appellate court might instead dismiss the case on the grounds that it was moot after Attorney General Alberto Gonzales announced in January 2007 that the warrantless surveillance program had been changed...