WASHINGTON, 5 November 2005 — The US Senate yesterday reaffirmed its support for an amendment outlawing the torture of prisoners, pushing the White House on the defensive over an alleged policy of permitting torture as criticism of US maltreatment of “war on terror” detainees and allegations that the CIA runs secret prisons around the world mounted.

Approving the measure that is attached to the 2006 defense spending bill that President George W. Bush has threatened to veto, the senators unanimously approved it by a simple voice vote.

The amendment would “prohibit cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of persons in the detention of the US government,” according to the text.

Republican Sen. John McCain, who authored the amendment, said he was concerned about “Machiavellian” attempts to remove the amendment from the defense appropriations bill.

According to McCain, the explicit ban on all prisoner torture has “an overwhelming majority” of support in the House of Representatives.

He emphatically ruled out an exemption to the torture ban for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), an exclusion backed by the Bush administration.

Another Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, said: “I will not entertain a retreat, I will not entertain an exception that washes away what we’ve been fighting for.”

On Thursday, a former top State Department official told a radio program that the office of Vice President Dick Cheney was behind directives that encouraged US forces’ torture of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan.

That followed a Washington Post report a day earlier that the CIA has operated a network of secret prisons in eight countries where about 30 people were being held and interrogated.

On Thursday, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, told National Public Radio he had traced a trail of memos and directives authorizing detainee abuse directly to Cheney’s staff.

Another sign of trouble for the White House was the rejection earlier this week by UN Human Rights rapporteurs of a Pentagon invitation to observe conditions at Guatanamo. Democratic members of Congress, and even some Republicans, have warned that the mounting evidence of prisoner mistreatment by US forces in the “war on terror” is destroying US credibility at home and abroad. “This is not what America stands for,” said Congressman Jim McGovern, D-Massachusetts.

Opposition to the McCain amendment has largely come from the offices of Cheney and CIA Director Porter Goss — both of whom unsuccessfully sought to strike a deal that would exempt the CIA from those provisions.

An editorial in Minneapolis Star Tribune Thursday was entitled: “US Must Dismantle Its Secret CIA Gulag; The Cheney Way in the War on Terror has been Disastrous.”

A Lansing, Michigan newspaper opines: “Torture: Senate Must Stick to Its Guns in Affirming Ban on Torture,” noting: “A spokesman for President Bush said Wednesday that Bush is ‘very clear that the United States will not torture’ prisoners, even those held by the CIA. Apparently, Vice President Dick Cheney hasn’t seen the memo. As recently as last week, Cheney and CIA Director Porter Goss were lobbying US senators to exempt the CIA from a torture ban.”

— Additional input from agencies