A Dangerous Veto Threat

Certainly. But bill supporters argue that no reasonable person would worry about torture restrictions under a possible end-of-world, ticking bomb scenario. And in any case, such arguments are little more than a subterfuge that obscures the real debate over every day treatment of prisoners in the wake of revelations of prisoner mistreatment in recent years at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay prisons, and secret prisons run outside the U.S.

"The Pentagon itself recognizes itself that it has a huge problem" related to treatment of U.S.-held prisoners abroad, said Deborah Pearlstein, director of the U.S. Law and Security Program at Human Rights First, a nonprofit international human rights organization. "That's why you see so many retired military voices coming to the fore. This conduct, whether you think it's deliberate at worst, or at the least, civilian leaders failing to monitor what others are doing, this has been incredibly damaging to U.S. security interests.

"It's putting our troops oversees at even greater risk than they are already. It's badly damaged relations with allies. And it's made it harder to get cooperation on counterterrorism agreements because people are concerned that we're going to mistreat prisoners. And it has clearly inflamed our enemies or people who otherwise wouldn't be our enemies overseas."

Pearlstein coauthored a comprehensive report on this subject, called "Behind the Wire: Ending Secret Detentions." Among other things, the report details the extensive effort of the U.S. government to win hearts and minds in the Middle East. The report says, for instance, that the State Department and U.S. Board of Broadcasters, which overseas non-military international broadcasting, is spending some $42 million on pro-U.S. radio and television in the region. But those efforts are undermined by reports of torture and prisoner mistreatment at U.S. facilities around the world.

"The United States' ability to deploy these tools effectively depends critically on visible demonstration that the United States' deeds match its words in supporting democracy and human rights," Pearlstein and colleague Priti Patel wrote in the wrote. "In Indonesia, a spokesman for the Foreign Affairs Ministry stated: 'The U.S. government does not have the moral authority to assess or act as a judge of other countries, including Indonesia, on human rights, especially after the abuse scandal at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.'"

The United States has been, until recently, a leader in the fight for human rights on the battlefield, backing both the Geneva Convention and the U.N. Convention Against Torture, which the U.S. ratified in 1994, and bans the torture of prisoners.

Of course, many of those nations continue to torture in secret, even as they proclaim to abhor the practice. Since 9/11, the Bush administration has come under fire repeatedly for sending captured terrorism suspects to countries that continue to torture.

Today, amazingly, America finds itself embroiled in the same kind of debate that Iran--one of the three nation's Bush admonished as a part of the "axis of evil"-- had three years ago when hardliners in the conservative Guardian Council repeatedly vetoed a version of a bill banning the torture of prisoners that had been pushed through the parliament by moderate backers of President Mohammad Khatami.

"This is supposed to be a war for hearts and minds, and a war to show the world that the we have standards," said Katherine Newell Bierman, counterterrorism counsel for the U.S. Program of Human Rights Watch. "Otherwise, we have the same means-to-an-ends approach, and it is not who we are as the American people. How many recruiting posters for al Qaeda have a picture of what was happened at Abu Ghraib? And what does it do to America's ability to effectively counter a long-term threat?"

Sen. McCain and his allies know the answer to those questions.

E-mail your comments to Terry at commentsforneal@washingtonpost.com.