“Senator John McCain [R-AZ] has tried to pressure the White House to forcefully renounce torture in its treatment of detainees. McCain sponsored antitorture legislation passed by Congress, but after [President] Bush signed the bill into law, he issued one of his controversial ‘signing statements’ saying, in effect, that he did not have to obey it. That left the legal status of enemy combatants and other terror detainees in limbo until the landmark Supreme Court ruling in the case of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, in which the court struck down Bush’s plan to try detainees via military commissions. More broadly, the June [29], 2006, ruling was seen as a rejection of Bush’s assertion of broad executive powers and raised doubts over whether many of his other antiterror measures might be in legal peril as well, including the NSA [National Security Agency] [warrantless eavesdropping] program.”
– James Risen, State of War, Page 228