Well, it’s been two years since the Iraq invasion, and it seems the Bush administration still needs to learn how to pick its battles. The U.S. Senate voted 90-9 yesterday to prohibit the “cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment” of prisoners in U.S. custody. In reality, the measure — an amendment to a military spending bill — merely clarifies rules of prisoner treatment that had been thrown into ambiguity ever since the invasion of Afghanistan, when the Bush administration decided to toss out the Geneva Conventions as a binding standard for military behavior. Nevertheless, the vote drew fierce opposition from the White House, which threatened a veto of the entire $445.5 billion Defense Department spending bill if the measure was not removed. The anti-torture amendment, said White House spokesman Scott McClellan, “would limit the president’s ability as commander-in-chief to effectively carry out the war on terrorism.” (The proposed ban on torture, by the way, doesn’t apply to the Central Intelligence Agency, nor does it prevent the military from moving prisoners to other countries where torture is allowed.)

Fortunately, many Democrats and Republicans — chief among them, Senator John McCain of Arizona — are standing up to the White House on this issue. An explicit ban on torture is the only moral and sensible thing to do, they say. “We have to clarify that this is not what the United States is all about. This is what makes us different from the enemy we are fighting,” said McCain, a former Navy pilot who was held and tortured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

In his remarks McCain cited a letter written to him by an officer in the 82nd Airborne Division, Capt. Ian Fishback, who served in both Afghanistan and Iraq. “Despite my efforts, I have been unable to get clear, consistent answers from my leadership about what constitutes lawful and humane treatment of detainees,” Fishback wrote in a September 16 letter to the senator. “I am certain that this confusion contributed to a wide range of abuses including death threats, beatings, broken bones, murder, exposure to elements, extreme forced physical exertion, hostage-taking, stripping, sleep deprivation and degrading treatment.” Fishback said he had complained to superiors for 17 months that soldiers were operating under conflicting views of what was humane treatment, and yet no one was able to point him to any explicit standards.

Fishback was the officer interviewed in the Human Rights Watch report on prisoner abuse that I mentioned in a post last week. While the Abu Ghraib investigations netted the convictions of nine low-ranking soldiers, the claims made by Fishback and others suggest that the problems at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere began at the top: with the generals and politicians who refused to impose clear standards of conduct. McCain took this case to the floor of the Senate yesterday. “We demanded intelligence without ever clearly telling our troops what was permitted and what was forbidden,” he said. “And then, when things went wrong, we blamed them and we punished them.”

Given all the other political fights it needs to focus on, it’s puzzling why the Bush administration is so intent on keeping its policy of no policy in place. Forty-six of the 90 senators voting for the amendment were Republicans. More than two dozen retired senior military officers, including Colin Powell and John Shalikashvili, have also come out publicly in support of the measure. The fact that so many members of his own party are opposing a wartime president on his wartime policies must be disquieting and humiliating for Bush. Of course, there’s still a good chance that the commander-in-chief will get his way: The House version of the military spending bill does not include the torture provision, and McCain and other supporters worry that it could be gutted in the negotiations to reconcile the two bills, if not axed by presidential veto.

As the White House well knows, the widespread, well-publicized abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib became a sort of Pearl Harbor for Muslim extremists around the world: If they had any doubts that the fight against the American Satan was a cause worth spilling blood for, now they could rest easy in their paranoia. Top officials in the Bush administration recognize the serious damage caused by the prison abuse scandals. What’s more, it is clear to some — including Bush-appointed CIA Director Porter Goss — that the American occupation, plagued as it has been by a host of tactical and moral failures, has become a rallying point “to recruit new, anti-U.S. jihadists.” How, then, can the administration persist in its belief that having a clear, consistent policy against torture will somehow endanger its war on terror? Having no policy clearly doesn’t seem to be helping things.

Now, what definitely seems to be harming things is the vitriol from anti-Muslim extremists like Republican Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska. “I believe we are seeing the beginning of a crusade against freedom from the militant terrorist Islamic entities throughout the world,” said Stevens in opposing the amendment. “If this amendment passes, the United States will not have effective control of those people.”

“Crusade”? “Effective control of those people”? Did I say they were paranoid?

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen