Last Friday President Bush signed an executive order to ensure that CIA interrogation tactics do not violate the Geneva Conventions. CIA Director Michael Hayden said in a statement that:

"The order provides specific requirements that ensure a CIA-run terrorist detention and interrogation program would be in full compliance with U.S. obligations under Common Article 3,"

This certainly appears to be a step in the right direction. That said though, there are still some serious grey areas that have not been addressed. These include the current status of any CIA detention and interrogation program and exactly what measures will be used. The White House has come under repeated fire for the use of waterboarding – simulated drowning – amongst other tactics and it is unclear whether or not this would be discontinued under the new guidelines.

Furthermore, there is still a lot of room for interpretation based on these guidelines, which outlaw the use of:

- Torture or other acts of violence serious enough to be considered comparable to murder, torture, mutilation and cruel or inhuman treatment.

- Willful or outrageous acts of personal abuse done to humiliate or degrade someone in a way so serious that any reasonable person would "deem the acts to be beyond the bounds of human decency, such as sexual or sexually indecent acts undertaken for the purpose of humiliation, forcing the individual to perform sexual acts or to pose sexually, threatening the individual with sexual mutilation.

- Acts intended to denigrate the religion, religious practices, or religious objects of an individual.

Certainly promising, but it depends to a great extent on what exactly one defines as torture.