Washington – The Senate delivered a stern rebuke to the Bush administration Wednesday night, adding language banning U.S. torture of military prisoners to a $440 billion military spending bill in defiance of a White House threat to veto the whole bill if the anti-torture language was attached.
The Republican-majority Senate followed the lead of maverick Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., voting 90-9 to add the anti-torture language to the legislation.
Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, a retired Army general, joined 28 other retired senior military officers in endorsing the amendment.
Their measure would ban the use of “cruel, inhuman or degrading” treatment of any prisoner in U.S. hands.
It’s a response to the revelations of torture by U.S. personnel of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, which roused worldwide disgust.
McCain, a prisoner of war tortured by his captors during the Vietnam War, cited a letter written to him by Army Capt. Ian Fishback asking Congress to do justice to the nation’s soldiers.
“Give them clear standards of conduct that reflect the ideals they risk their lives for,” Fishback wrote the senator.
“We owe it to them,” McCain said on the Senate floor. “We threw out the rules that our soldiers had trained on and replaced them with a confusing and constantly changing array of standards. … We demanded intelligence without ever clearly telling our troops what was permitted and what was forbidden.”
Even if the Senate passes the bill with the anti-torture language, both face an uncertain future. The House of Representatives has passed a bill without anti-torture language.
