Vice President Dick Cheney has been toiling behind the scenes to kill an amendment sponsored by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., to the Defense Department funding bill. The measure would explicitly outlaw “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” of prisoners in U.S. custody here or abroad.

President Bush threatens to veto the entire bill unless the CIA is exempted from the provision. How can a nation that prides itself on its centuries of courage and sacrifice in defense of freedom even be having this debate? It is nothing short of shameful.

This is not a mere theoretical discourse. The other day, The Washington Post revealed that the CIA is running a secret network of prison camps in Eastern Europe and other countries where they are interrogating terror suspects. This Soviet-style gulag was hidden from the American people, from Congress, from the people of the host countries, and, of course, from the families and lawyers of the prisoners. These detainees have been “disappeared,” to use the infamous term of South American dictatorships. What is going on at these camps is anyone’s guess, but you can be sure Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney want a license to torture for a reason.

The Bush administration has shown its contempt for American and international human rights laws in other ways. They have “outsourced” interrogation of detainees to countries where legal restraints and a free press are nonexistent; in sickening photographs that shocked the world, U.S. military personnel at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, goaded and inspired by U.S. intelligence agency overseers, were seen physically and sexually brutalizing inmates; several Afghan and Iraqi prisoners are known to have died at the hands of Americans; likewise, inmates at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have been ill-treated.

On Nov. 7, the very day President Bush declared “we do not torture,” the U.S. Army charged five Rangers with abusing detainees in Iraq. Not a single senior officer or civilian has been held accountable for any of these abuses.

The administration relies on a host of untested assumptions to justify its torture policy. First, they suggest, these suspects are guilty and therefore are entitled to no rights. Second, these detainees have such crucial knowledge about grievous threats to our security that we cannot afford to be humanitarian. Third, torture extracts useful intelligence.

Our values and the rule of law refute these assumptions. First, the closed, secretive system created for “terror suspects” allows no possibility of challenging the guilt of these people. Second, if they were all guilty or had valuable intelligence, why has the United States released hundreds of people from Abu Ghraib? An unpublished Army report last May concluded that many Iraqis were held in that prison merely for expressing “displeasure or ill will” toward the American occupying forces. Third, torture is not useful, much less moral, as expert after expert has argued.

We should be listening to John McCain – himself a POW victim of torture in Vietnam. He knows far better than Dick Cheney or George W. Bush that torture is ineffective and unreliable, that even a brave man will say anything in the thick of unbearable torture.

Our military leaders want to abide by international standards; they believe that clear rules on interrogation would have prevented the Abu Ghraib disgrace; they know that torture is not only an unreliable and virtually useless intelligence tool, but provokes cruel mistreatment of our own men and women captured by our enemies.

Finally, as Sen. McCain has said, “This is about who we are.” Americans are appalled by what is being done in our name. The policies of this administration are destroying our credibility in the effort against terrorists. It is not enough to adopt laws that say we will not torture or that we not ship our detainees to places where the rule of law is blatantly ignored. Those laws are needed – and I have co-sponsored them – but we also must vigorously enforce basic human rights laws. If we continue to countenance torture and other inhuman practices by the CIA or anyone else under our control, we will be seen as no better than our enemies.

We also have a duty to find out why these abuses occurred, and hold responsible those who ordered or condoned these acts. That is why I am an original co-sponsor of HR 3003, introduced by Rep. Henry Waxman, which would establish a bipartisan independent commission to investigate detainee abuses. The truth must be revealed so that our country’s policies and practices reflect our core values.

Democrat Tom Allen is Maine’s 1st District congressman.