Our leadership in Washington seems to have lost its moral compass, at least where humane treatment of war prisoners is concerned.

There's no other way to explain the current developments, where Congress and the White House have clashed over an amendment to a military-spending bill that would ban "cruel, inhuman and degrading" interrogations. The Bush administration wants to scuttle the amendment, or at least insert an exception for the CIA.

This is an appalling notion, especially when it's compounded by reports of a global system of secret prisons being run by the CIA for interrogating al-Qaida captives. It's increasingly apparent that the White House believes intelligence agents ought to operate entirely without restrictions.

Granted, the war on terrorism demands that the United States move aggressively to gather intelligence and that much of this work must be done undercover. But according to the Washington Post's report on the four-year-old hidden detention facilities, known in Washington as "black sites," even CIA officials are starting to question the legality of isolating suspects and shrouding their circumstances in secrecy.

That indeed is cause for worry.

But the hand-wringing over constraints on torture is the most worrisome aspect of all.

U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., has introduced the amendment in the military spending bill. His thinking on the issue is illuminated in large part by his own experience as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, where his solitary confinement was punctuated by repeated torture.

McCain argues that, even if torture were moral, it is far less productive than its defenders might imagine. A prisoner would say anything to make the pain stop, so how reliable can that information be?

Above all, the issue is one of our nation's standing in the global community. The United States signed the Geneva Conventions, and a policy that skirts that fact will not help us make our case in the Muslim world, or anywhere else. It surely places our own prisoners at greater risk.

And at a time when the United States purports to be exporting our democratic ideals internationally, we should not behave as if international law does not apply to us.