A day after the House
overwhelmingly endorsed Mr. McCain's measure, the White House took a deal that
the senator had been offering for weeks as way to end the legislative impasse,
essentially giving intelligence operatives the same legal defense afforded
military interrogators who are accused of violating the regulations.
For Mr. Bush, it was a stinging
defeat, considering that his party controls both houses of Congress and both
chambers had defied his threatened veto to support Mr. McCain's measure
resoundingly. It was a particularly significant setback for Vice President Dick Cheney, who since July has
led the administration's fight to defeat the amendment or at least exempt the
Central Intelligence Agency from its provisions.
Mr. McCain's measure would
establish the Army Field Manual as the uniform standard for the interrogation
of prisoners and ban the kind of abusive treatment of prisoners that was
revealed in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq.
"We've sent a message
to the world that the United States is not like the terrorists," Mr.
McCain, an Arizona Republican, said as he sat next to Mr. Bush in the Oval
Office. "What we are is a nation that upholds values and standards of behavior
and treatment of all people no matter how evil or bad they are."
Mr. Bush sought to make the
best of an awkward political situation by inviting Mr. McCain, his longtime
political rival and the nation's most famous former prisoner of war, to the
White House to thank him for a measure that the president had opposed for
months as Congressional meddling.
On Thursday Mr. Bush said it
was important legislation "to achieve a common objective: that is to make
it clear to the world that this government does not torture."
Soon after Mr. McCain left
the White House, Mr. Bush's national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, who
has negotiated with the senator for weeks, said that as a result of the
negotiations the law would apply "equally to men and women in uniform and
for civilians who are involved in dealing with detainees and
interrogations."
The agreement will also
extend to intelligence officers a protection now afforded to military
personnel, who if accused of violating interrogation rules can defend
themselves if a "reasonable" person could have concluded they were
following a lawful order. But Mr. Hadley conceded that the administration was
unable to get a grant of immunity for C.I.A. interrogators, which he said
"was a legitimate thing to consider in this context."
The effect of the deal, Mr.
Hadley said, would be to cement in law what he insisted had been administration
policy: that the United States would "not use cruel, inhuman or degrading
treatment at home or abroad."
The immediate effect of the
measure, if passed, is hard to predict. Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales,
who was at the heart of last year's uproar over whether the administration had
allowed torture in the fight against terror, said on CNN that Mr. McCain's
amendment "provides additional clarification, in terms of what are the
limits of interrogating dangerous terrorists."
"Obviously, we'll study
the law carefully," Mr. Gonzales said. "And to the extent that we
have to conform our conduct in any way, we will do so. People need to
understand what the limits are. And if people don't meet those limits, they're
going to be investigated and they're going to be held accountable."
The White House announcement
was not the end of what has become a long-running drama on Capitol Hill.
Less than an hour after Mr.
McCain and Senator John W. Warner, a Virginia Republican who heads the Armed
Services Committee, stood with the president, the Republican chairman of the
House Armed Services Committee, Representative Duncan Hunter of California,
announced he would block the deal as part of a military budget bill unless the
White House provided a letter containing specific assurances that the measure
would not diminish intelligence-gathering capabilities.
Asked if the intelligence
authorities had told him that Mr. McCain's measure would harm their ability to
do their work, he said: "The answer to that is yes."
On the other side of the
Capitol, Mr. Hunter's counterpart, Mr. Warner, was scrambling to patch the rift
by working with the White House to release the letter Mr. Hunter had requested.
By Thursday evening, Mr. Hunter was reassured in writing by John D. Negroponte,
the director of national intelligence, that American intelligence-gathering
operations would not suffer under Mr. McCain's measure, and he consented to the
deal, said Josh Holly, a spokesman for the House Armed Services Committee.
Mr. Warner said he was
optimistic that his bill would pass. But just in case, he was exploring another
option: attaching the newly drafted McCain language to a $453 billion military
spending bill, also pending before the Senate. The bill already includes the
original McCain provisions, and the chairman of the Senate Appropriations
Committee, Senator Ted Stevens, Republican of Alaska, said he would accept the
language negotiated by the White House.
The McCain measure has
veto-proof majorities in both houses. The Senate has backed it 90 to 9, and the
House voted Wednesday, 308 to 122, to support it.
At the C.I.A., whose use of
harsh interrogation tactics against suspected terrorists was at the core of the
debate, the official response was circumspect. "The C.I.A. understands its
legal obligations and of course complies with U.S. policy," said Jennifer
Dyck, the agency's chief spokeswoman.
But A. John Radsan, who
served as assistant general counsel of the C.I.A. from 2002 to 2004, said he
believed that "the C.I.A. is the loser in this."
While agency officers may
benefit from greater clarity about the rules of interrogation, Porter J. Goss,
the C.I.A. director, had joined Mr. Cheney in arguing that the agency needed
the flexibility to use harsh tactics in some cases.
The McCain amendment removes
the "gray zone" of tactics less severe than torture but harsher than
those allowed by the Army Field Manual, said Mr. Radsan, now at William
Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul.
Jeffrey H. Smith, who served
as C.I.A. general counsel from 1995 to 1996, said he believed there was a gap
between Mr. Goss and other top managers, who sided with Mr. Cheney, and many
lower-level officers who felt uncomfortable with any perception that they had
been allowed to use techniques bordering on torture.
"I think the overall
reaction of the rank-and-file officers will be relief that this issue is behind
them and the rules are clear," Mr. Smith said.