The US Senate cleared a $445 billion bill to fund the Pentagon on Friday which includes another $50 billion for the Iraq war, after rebuking the Bush administration for abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere.
On a unanimous vote, senators sent the defence spending bill to a conference with the House of Representatives where it faces a battle over Senate amendments to restrict the Pentagon's interrogations and treatment of military prisoners and detainees.
Earlier in the week, the Senate bucked a White House veto threat and overwhelmingly backed an effort by Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican who was tortured while a prisoner of war in Vietnam, to establish the Army field manual as the standard for interrogations and bar cruel and degrading treatment of anyone in US military custody.
Senators also voted to clarify the legal status of enemy combatants at the Guantanamo Bay military prison and increase congressional oversight of their detention and release.
Under that amendment, President George W. Bush must submit to Congress procedures for the tribunal on detainee cases and the review board on detainees' status. It also bars use of statements obtained with "undue coercion" when determining status of a detainee.
Final passage of the defence bill was delayed a day by an unrelated dispute over a demand by Sen. Mary Landrieu, a Louisiana Democrat, to free up relief money more quickly for victims of the Gulf Coast hurricanes.
The White House, which threatened to veto the must-pass spending bill over the detainee measures, said it will work in the House-Senate conference for a final bill with language more to its liking. It argues the measures would tie its hands in fighting terrorists.
"We will continue to work with congressional leaders as they move forward. This is part of the legislative process, and there is more to go," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said on Thursday, noting the House version did not include the detainee measures.
But with the Pentagon needing more money by mid-November for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the administration may be quicker to accept restrictions on its detainee policies to avoid holding up the spending bill, several senators said.
The Senate defence bill's $50 billion in emergency funds for the wars brings their costs to more than $350 billion, with most of that spent in Iraq. The administration is expected to seek more war money in February or March next year.
The House bill has $45 billion for the wars, but House members are expected to agree to the higher number.
The Congressional Research Service said the Pentagon was spending a monthly average of $6 billion in Iraq and $1 billion in Afghanistan, with Iraq's average cost up 19 percent from a year ago.
Senator John Warner, a Virginia Republican who chairs the Armed Services Committee, said the lopsided Senate vote gives lawmakers a strong hand to protect the regulations in negotiations with the House.
"That was an extraordinary vote in the face of the administration's position to the contrary," Warner told reporters on Thursday.
A number of lawmakers have blamed abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and other US military prisons on the administration's vague policies coupled with intense pressure on US personnel to extract information from detainees.
They said those abuses, which resulted in a world-wide scandal with published photographs of physical and sexual mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, have damaged the United States' international standing and risk retribution on US soldiers who may be captured in the future.
In work on the defence bill last week, the Senate added $3.9 billion in emergency funding for avian flu protection, to stock up on anti-viral drugs and increase global surveillance of the disease.
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