The delay is meant to give combatant commanders a chance to review the changes, according to a Pentagon official, but Army sources said there is another reason as well: White House resistance to the new manual's more restrictive approach to detainee interrogation.

The new manual includes customary waiver powers for the secretary of defense to preserve flexibility. However, legislation pending before Congress complicates the matter, a Pentagon official told United Press International Tuesday.

Arizona Republican and former prisoner of war Sen. John McCain secured Senate approval of an amendment to the defense appropriations bill in October that would both prohibit abuse and torture and establish the field manual as the uniform lawful standard for the interrogation of Department of Defense detainees.

An Army source said the White House is concerned the field manual would apply to the detention center at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base and other places "enemy combatants" are held. With the document enshrined by law, military personnel could be subject to legal action if they used techniques other than those enumerated in the field manual, a congressional source said.

While the waiver authority included in the field manual would allow the Defense Department to lift those restrictions when it deems necessary, a Pentagon official said those instances would now potentially be subject to legal or congressional review.

"We don't want to do anything that could restrict the commander-in-chief's ability to fight the global war on terror," a Pentagon official said Tuesday.

Army Field Manual 2-22.3 -- Human Intelligence Collector Operations -- will replace FM-34-52 on intelligence interrogation. Army officials expected it to be released Thursday but the date was pushed back by the Pentagon until the worldwide combatant commanders could review it.

An Army source said the new field manual "leans farther forward" on the matter of humane treatment of detainees, tying it more closely than the existing field manual on intelligence interrogation to the principles laid out in the Geneva Conventions.

That has been the intention of the Army since the rewrite began in earnest after the 2004 Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal.

"You'll see a much closer binding of the Geneva Conventions laws of war ... with the techniques of interrogations" in the new field manual, said Thomas Gandy, director of the Army's Counterintelligence, Human Intelligence, Foreign Disclosure and Security Directorate in an interview with the Baltimore Sun in March 2005.

The need for the rewrite became clear after the Abu Ghraib scandal when investigations revealed significant confusion among troops and officers over permissible techniques.

At Abu Ghraib and other detention facilities in Iraq -- a war ostensibly covered by the Geneva Conventions -- interrogators and guards used dogs to frighten detainees, stripped detainees naked to humiliate them and put detainees into periods of extended isolation and sensory deprivation. These were violations of the Geneva Conventions and fell outside the realm of humane treatment, an Army report found.

The violations came about because techniques approved for use in Guantanamo Bay and Afghanistan, places the White House decided did not fall under Geneva protections, "migrated" to Iraq as soldiers moved between the wars and guidance from one was used to craft interrogation techniques in the others.

"The advantage of setting a standard for interrogation based on the Field Manual is to cut down on the significant level of confusion that still exists with respect to which interrogation techniques are allowed," said McCain when he introduced the amendment on the Senate floor in October.

"I can understand why some administration lawyers might want ambiguity, so that every hypothetical option is theoretically open, even those the president has said he does not want to exercise. But war does not occur in theory, and our troops are not served by ambiguity. They are crying out for clarity."

Like the 1992 version of the field manual it replaces, 2.22-3 will list out acceptable interrogation procedures but this time in a classified annex to prevent future prisoners from knowing what techniques will be used against them. Al-Qaida prisoners' ability to resist standard interrogation techniques is often cited by Pentagon officials as the reason more flexibility is needed.

The new field manual is expected to be more specific and more restrictive, an Army official said Tuesday -- just as the 1992 update to the 1987 field manual on interrogation was more restrictive with regard to what qualified as humane treatment. The earlier version allowed military interrogators to completely control access to food, clothing, shelter, light and heat as a means of breaking down prisoners.

Gandy told the Baltimore Sun the new field manual will specifically prohibit sleep deprivation, light deprivation, stripping prisoners and the use of dogs to scare prisoners. Those techniques were not specifically approved nor prohibited in the 1992 version, giving interrogators far more freedom in questioning prisoners.

The 1992 version outlined 17 allowable interrogation techniques, many of them broad enough to engender creative interpretation. Among them are "fear-up" -- exploiting a detainee's specific fears -- and "pride and ego-down" -- humiliating a prisoner.

With interrogation and detainee policy an international and national political hot button, the field manual has been repeatedly delayed. In February Gandy said at a Pentagon press conference it would be complete in March. In March he told the Sun it would be complete in two months. A new release date has not yet been set.

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