By Adam Graham-Silverman, CQ Staff

House Democrats hope to score some political points Tuesday during an attempt to override President Bush’s veto of intelligence authorization legislation, even if the vote is all but certain to fail.

The debate will allow Democrats to continue to criticize President Bush’s interrogation policies and highlight opposition to the bill (HR 2082) by the presumed Republican presidential nominee, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, Democratic aides said.

“The point is that we’re making a clear distinction between Democrats and the Bush administration,” said one aide. “Democrats are making the case against the use of torture because it is immoral and violates our nation’s deepest values, and we will continue to fight against it.”

The House adopted the conference report Dec. 13 by a 222-199 vote — far short of the two-thirds majority required to override a veto. The Senate cleared the measure, 51-45, Feb. 13, and Bush vetoed it March 8.

A provision in the bill would extend to the CIA and other agencies interrogation restrictions that already have been imposed on the military. It would confine the agencies to techniques authorized by the September 2006 Army Field Manual on Human Intelligence Collector Operations.

President Bush said the bill would wrongly tie the CIA’s hands and give terrorists a public glimpse of interrogation procedures. He pointed out that the manual was readily available on the Internet.

“Shortly after 9/11, we learned that key al Qaeda operatives had been trained to resist the methods outlined in the manual,” he said in his March 8 radio address.

In a veto statement to Congress, Bush said his concern was “the need to maintain a separate CIA program that will shield from disclosure to al Qaeda and other terrorists the interrogation techniques they may face upon capture.”

John D. Rockefeller IV , D-W.Va., chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, responded: “I have heard nothing to suggest that information obtained from enhanced interrogation techniques has prevented an imminent terrorist attack. On the other hand, I do know that coercive interrogations can lead detainees to provide false information in order to make the interrogation stop.”

McCain, a former prisoner of war in Vietnam and outspoken opponent of torture, voted against clearing the conference report. He said at the time that the CIA should be allowed additional techniques that do not violate anti-torture conventions.

McCain has said waterboarding, one of the techniques the legislation would ban, is “illegal, and I oppose it.”

The bill would authorize a classified amount of funding for intelligence agencies for fiscal 2008. This is the first time in three years that Congress has delivered an annual intelligence authorization bill to the White House.

Tim Starks contributed to this story.