Congress barred the government on Tuesday from using any money in a newly passed emergency spending bill to subject anyone in American custody to torture or "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" that is forbidden by the US Constitution.
Proponents said the little-noticed provision, in a US$82-billion bill devoted mostly to financing military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, amounted to a significant strengthening of current policies and practises in the treatment of prisoners.
Drafted since the disclosure of abuses in Afghanistan and Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, it lays out a definition of illegal treatment that human-rights groups say is broader than the Bush administration's current interpretation, and links the ban directly to military spending.
"This sends a clear message to our own government that certain conduct is simply unacceptable," Senator Richard Durbin, who sponsored the provision, said in an interview. "And it reminds the world that what happened at the Abu Ghraib prison is not American policy and is not tolerated," he said.
The administration, which helped defeat efforts to include antitorture restrictions in legislation last year, said it did not oppose the provision in the new military operations bill. The Senate passed that bill on Tuesday by a vote of 100 to 0, after approval by the House last week, and the administration indicated Tuesday that President George W. Bush would sign it into law.
"If the Congress wants to use the appropriation process to dictate government action, that's within their power, and the Department of Justice did not oppose it," said Kevin Madden, spokesman for the department.
Trent Duffy, a spokesman for the White House, declined to address the merits of the antitorture provision but said that the White House was aware of it and that Bush wanted to sign the bill quickly.
"The president has made clear that this administration does not condone torture," Duffy said. "That is administration policy, and that still stands."
In opposing antitorture measures last year, the White House said they were unnecessary and would provide expanded legal rights to which foreign prisoners were not entitled. One such measure would have specifically subjected US intelligence officers at the CIA and elsewhere to new restrictions, with implications for the agency's overseas interrogation of senior leaders of al-Qaeda.
The provision approved on Tuesday does not include any specific references to intelligence officers. Human-rights advocates said it was unclear whether the prohibition would restrict the ability of the CIA or other government agencies to conduct so-called renditions -- to send terrorism suspects to be interrogated in other countries, even those that are known to engage in torture of prisoners.
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