Waterboarding

The Senate just passed the Intelligence authorization conference package on the floor. It includes a provision universalizing the interrogation tactics enumerated in the Army Field Manual, and therefore forbidding the use of waterboarding. I'm still not exactly sure why most Republicans voted to invoke cloture on the package, but they did. And when it came to the floor, the final tally was 51-45. One of those 45 was the Sultan of Straight Talk, John McCain.

Update: After running through the comments in this post, I should add that the anti-waterboarding provision is the provision that Republican leaders cited as they urged the caucus to vote against the bill. Here's the bill itself. It's an authorization package. It was signed off in the conference committee by a couple of GOP senators. The waterboarding section--which reads: "No individual in the custody or under the effective control of an element of the intelligence community or instrumentality thereof, regardless of nationality or physical location, shall be subject to any treatment or technique of interrogation not authorized by the United States Army Field Manual on Human Intelligence Collector Operations"--is the reason the president's threatening to veto it. It's the reason McCain sneaked into the chamber, voted with his party against it, and sneaked back out.

Apologies if the original post wasn't specific enough.