WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration drafted amendments to the War Crimes Act that would retroactively protect policy makers from possible criminal charges for authorizing any humiliating and degrading treatment of detainees, according to lawyers who have seen the proposal. The move by the administration is the latest effort to deal with the treatment of those taken into custody in the war on terror. At issue are interrogations carried out by the CIA and the degree to which harsh tactics such as water-boarding were authorized by administration officials. A separate law, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, applies to the military. When interrogators engage in waterboarding, prisoners are strapped to a plank and dunked in water until nearly drowning. One section of the draft would outlaw torture and inhuman or cruel treatment, but it does not contain prohibitions from Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions against ``outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment." Another section would apply the legislation retroactively, according to two lawyers who have seen the contents of the section and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because their sources did not authorize them to release the information.