The Senate has made it clear that torture, by any U.S. entity anywhere in the world, is wrong. Seeking a way around such a prohibition, the Bush administration is now seeking to allow the CIA to engage in torture. The Senate should hold its ground.

Earlier this month, the Senate, by a vote of 90 to 9, passed an amendment by Sen. John McCain banning cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees in U.S. custody. It would restrict military interrogators to using only practices authorized in the Army Field Manual. President Bush has threatened to veto a defense spending bill if it contains such a prohibition on torture. It would be his first veto.

Last week, Vice President Dick Cheney began openly advocating for torture by saying the amendment should be changed to allow the CIA to abuse foreign prisoners it is holding abroad. Mr. Cheney and CIA Director Porter Goss met with Sen. McCain last week. According to many news accounts, a one-paragraph memo from the administration called for excluding from the torture ban overseas clandestine counterterrorism operations by agencies other than the Pentagon “if the president determines that such operations are vital to the protection of the United States or its citizens from terrorist attack.”

Sen. McCain wasn’t buying it. “I don’t know how you protect your life by torturing somebody. I’ve never understood that scenario.” Sen. McCain should know. He was tortured while a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

Marine Maj. Sherwood Moran, who worked as an interrogator at Guadalcanal, likely wouldn’t have understood the need for such an exemption either. In a 1943 memo that is still studied by military officials, Maj. Moran wrote that treating prisoners as fellow human beings was the best approach to getting good information. “Forget, as it were, the ‘enemy’ stuff, and the ‘prisoner’ stuff. I tell them to forget it, telling them I am talking as a human being to a human being. And they respond to this.”

“You should be hard-boiled but not half-baked,” he wrote. “Deep human sympathy can go with a business-like, systematic and ruthlessly persistent approach.”

Good advice for an administration that presided over the abuse of prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and a U.S. detention center in Cuba. Autopsy reports on 44 prisoners who died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan indicate that 21 were victims of homicide, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. Some of the deaths followed abusive interrogations by elite Navy SEALs, military intelligence officers and the CIA, the group said after reviewing military autopsy reports.

Instead of carving out exceptions for such treatment, the administration should be working to end it.