The Act sets the Army's standards of interrogation as the standard for all agencies in the Department of Defense. It prohibits all other agencies of the U.S. government, such as the
CIA, from subjecting any person in their custody to "cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment". However, the Act does not provide detailed guidelines that spell out the meaning of that phrase. In an effort to provide clarification, Congress passed legislation in 2008 to similarly constrain the intelligence community to the Field Manual's techniques. McCain voted against this bill and recommended that President Bush follow through on his threat to veto it, arguing that the CIA already could not engage in torture but should have more options than afforded to military interrogators. That bill was passed by both chambers of Congress but, once vetoed, failed to pass with sufficient votes to override the executive veto. The Detainee Treatment Act cited the
U.S. Army's Field Manual on interrogation as the authoritative guide to interrogation techniques, but did not cite a specific edition of the Manual. The contents of the Manual are controlled by the Department of Defense, and thus the executive branch controls whether a given technique will be permitted or banned. The Manual has been revised since the Amendment became law. The Department of Defense has claimed that none of the techniques permitted by the new Field Manual 2-22.3 is classified. Also, the Detainee Treatment Act's anti-torture provisions were modified by the Graham-Levin Amendment, which was attached to the $453 billion 2006 Defense Budget Bill. The Graham-Levin Amendment permits the Department of Defense to consider evidence obtained through torture of Guantanamo Bay detainees, and expands the prohibition of
habeas corpus for re-detainees, which subsequently leaves detainees no
legal recourse if they are tortured. Critics say these two actions deflate the Detainee Treatment Act from having any real power in stopping torture by the United States government, and these were the reasons why President Bush and McCain "conceded" to congressional demands. The media credited their concession to "overwhelming congressional support" for the measure. Amnesty International claims that the amendment's loopholes signal that torture is now official US policy. The Republican senators
Lindsey Graham and
Jon Kyl have been criticized for their
amicus curiae brief filed in the
Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006) case, in which they argued that the Detainee Treatment Act's passage sufficed to deny the Supreme Court jurisdiction over the case. Language in the
Congressional Record, which is cited in the
majority opinion, was inserted by Graham and Kyl into the Record for the day on which the amendment passed
after the legislation had already been enacted. The language in question was worded in such a manner as to imply it had been recorded in live debate. The revised Record contains such phrasing as Kyl's "Mr. President, I see that we are nearing the end of our allotted time" and Sen.
Sam Brownback's "If I might interrupt". Brownback has not responded to press inquiries. Justice
Scalia's dissent noted this incident as an example on which he has based his longstanding hostility to the use of legislative history in court decisions. Scalia wrote: ==See also==