Senior lawyers in the Obama administration are deeply divided over some of the counterterrorism powers they inherited from President George W. Bush, according to interviews and a review of legal briefs.

The discussions have centered on how to define the types of terrorism suspects who may be detained without trials as wartime prisoners. The outcome of the debate could reverberate through national security policies.

After the Twin Towers attack, Bush claimed virtually unlimited power as commander in chief to detain those he deemed a threat. But President Obama and his administration have sought to demonstrate that the executive branch can wage war while also respecting limits imposed on presidential power by what they see as the rule of law.

At a White House meeting Obama declared that he did not want to invoke unrestrained commander-in-chief powers in detention matters. His Justice Department told that the president could detain without trial only people who were part of Al Qaeda or its affiliates. And it acknowledged that the scope and limits of that power were defined by the laws of war, as translated to a conflict against terrorists.

The debate flared again in last summer, when the Obama administration confronted the case of an Algerian man who had been arrested in Bosnia and was being held without trial by the United States at Guantánamo. He was accused of facilitating the travel of people who wanted to go to Afghanistan to join Al Qaeda. A judge found that such “direct support” was enough to hold him as a wartime prisoner, and the Justice Department asked an appeals court to uphold that ruling.