On Wednesday, the Senate overwhelmingly passed, 90-9, an amendment to the Defense spending bill that would “establish the Army Field Manual as the uniform standard for the interrogation of Department of Defense detainees.” Opponents of the McCain amendment are expected to try to gut the Senate-passed measure during conference negotiations with their House counterparts. That would be a mistake, according to Tom Donnelly and Vance Serchuk of the American Enterprise Institute. They write:
[C]onfusion on detainee treatment is also bad for America’s soldiers, who deserve clear guidance from their commanders. As a collective letter by several dozen retired general officers noted, the net effect of the current Pentagon policy is that service members have been given conflicting instructions, then ‘left to take the blame when things went wrong.’
