More than 20 Republican senators rejected a ban on the use of cruel and degrading treatment of prisoners on Tuesday, voting against an ultimately successful measure to permanently prevent a repeat of the CIA’s once secret and now widely-discredited torture program.



The bipartisan amendment reaffirms President Barack Obama’s prohibition of interrogation techniques such as waterboarding and sleep deprivation, which were developed by the CIA under the administration of his predecessor, George W Bush.

The measure passed in the Senate, 78-21.

However Republican hawks, including Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, opposed the amendment, despite an impassioned plea from their colleague, John McCain, who called on them to avoid the “dark path of sacrificing our values for our short-term security needs”.

The Arizona Republican, who was tortured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam and is chairman of the Senate armed services committee, co-authored the amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act – a must-pass defense appropriations bill – with Democrat Dianne Feinstein.

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Feinstein led the Senate investigation into the CIA’s secret torture program, the blistering conclusions of which were made public six months ago, in a report revealing how the agency lied about gruesome interrogation techniques deemed to have been brutal and ineffective.

The McCain-Feinstein amendment codifies an existing ban on torture introduced by Obama shortly after he was installed in the White House in 2009. Obama’s executive order, which restricts all government employees, including CIA agents, to only use the techniques specified in the Army Field Manual, could theoretically be reversed by a future president.

Should the McCain-Feinstein amendment be made law, however, it will be harder for future administrations to repeat the actions of the Bush administration, which used controversial legal opinions to justify torturing detainees. The amendment would also turn into law a second component of the Obama order, which requires the Red Cross to have access to detainees in US custody, bringing America into line with the Geneva convention.

During a swing through New Hampshire on Tuesday, Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush was asked about the “enhanced interrogation methods” installed under his brother after 9/11.



“I think it was appropriate at the time,” said Bush, in response to a question from Fox News’s Sean Hannity as part of a pre-taped interview. “I don’t think we need it [now].”

Florida senator Marco Rubio, regarded as Bush’s main rival in the Republican presidential contest, missed the vote but said he would have opposed the torture ban.



“I would have voted no on this amendment. I do not support telegraphing to the enemy what interrogation techniques we will or won’t use, and denying future commanders in chief and intelligence officials important tools for protecting the American people and the U.S. homeland,” Rubio said in a statement provided by his office to the Guardian.



Other Republican senators running for candidate were split on the amendment: South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, a chief defense hawk, voted against it, while Kentucky senator Rand Paul and Texas senator Ted Cruz voted for it.

Naureen Shah, director of Amnesty International USA’s security and human rights program, stressed the significance of the vote passing in a Republican-controlled Congress.

She described the bipartisan support of the amendment as “a huge repudiation” of the former Bush administration officials who, she said, have fought hard since publication of the Senate report to defend the CIA’s tactics and “turn this into a partisan issue”.



Laura Pitter, a senior national security counsel at Human Rights Watch, said that the techniques used by the CIA were “already clearly prohibited under US law” when they were practiced, and it was possible a future administration could once again find a way around the rules.

However she argued the legislation cementing Obama’s order, which mandates the US military and agencies to only use techniques permitted in the army manual, would serve as an additional bulwark and “help reinforce the ban in the future”.

Opponents of the McCain-Feinstein amendment, Pitter added, may have raised reservations about the US committing to rules over detention that are contained in the army manual, which is a public document.

Prior to the vote, Feinstein told fellow senators that Obama’s ban on torture was “only guaranteed for as long as a future president agrees to leave them in place”. Although the techniques employed by the CIA were illegal, Feinstein added, there was also a possibility that flawed legal opinions justifying the techniques “could be written again”.

She pointed out that CIA director John Brennan agreed with the president’s 2009 prohibition of enhanced interrogation techniques and called on fellow senators “to recommit ourselves to the fundamental precept that the United States does not torture, without equivocation, without exception”.

However that was not a position that more than a third of Republican senators could agree with. McConnell and his majority whip, John Cornyn - the two most senior lawmakers in the Senate – were among the 21 senators to oppose the measure. All those who voted against the amendment were Republican.

McCain used a speech before the vote to read out a list of senior military figures who he said backed the permanent ban on those past interrogation practices which, he said, “compromised our values, stained our national honor and did little good”.

Additional reporting by Sabrina Siddiqui