WASHINGTON, Dec 3: The US government announced a major reversal in its policy towards terrorism suspects on Tuesday night and decided to allow one such suspect, an American citizen of Saudi origin, to engage a lawyer.

The Bush administration had previously argued that those arrested as terrorism suspects, even if they have American citizenship, were enemy combatants and were not entitled to have lawyers.

Yaser Esam Hamdi, 21, was captured in Afghanistan with Taliban soldiers and brought to the US detention camp at the Guantanamo Bay base after the fall of the Taliban regime in December 2001.

After it was discovered that he was born in Louisiana and is a US citizen, authorities transferred him to a Navy facility in Virginia, last year. The change in policy came on the eve of a government filing at the US Supreme Court, which had been asked by a federal public defender in Virginia to review Hamdi’s detention.

On Monday, the US Supreme Court also agreed to review a lower court ruling on whether people working for the government could covertly arrest suspects in other countries.