While the executive order flatly forbids torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, its failure to specify permissible and impermissible techniques seems designed to leave the CIA wiggle room. A prohibition on “acts of violence,” for example, applies only to those violent acts “serious enough to be considered comparable to murder, torture, mutilation, and cruel or inhuman treatment,” as defined by the Military Commissions Act. The MCA, in turn, limits “cruel and inhuman treatment” to the infliction of bodily injury that entails: “(i) a substantial risk of death; (ii) extreme physical pain; (iii) a burn or physical disfigurement of a serious nature (other than cuts, abrasions, or bruises); or (iv) significant loss or impairment of the function of a bodily member, organ, or mental faculty.” In other words, the president’s order appears to permit cutting or bruising a suspect so long as the injury does not risk death, significant functional impairment or “extreme physical pain,” an entirely subjective term.

Similarly, the order prohibits “willful and outrageous acts of personal abuse done for the purpose of humiliation or degrading the individuals in a manner so serious that any reasonable person, considering the circumstances, would deem the acts to be beyond the bounds of human decency.” But this implies that it is permissible to inflict any abuse that is willful but not outrageous, or that is done for a purpose other than humiliation or degradation, or that a single reasonable person might consider within the bounds of decency under the circumstances. Whatever else one might say, these are hardly “clear rules.”

The executive order’s most revealing words come at the end. Its final section states that the order creates no rights enforceable by any victim against the United States or its employees, while expressly offering CIA employees a defense against any attempt to hold them liable for abuse. The ultimate purpose of the law, in other words, is to protect the potential perpetrators, not the potential victims.

Nor is there any mechanism for enforcement outside the courts. The International Committee for the Red Cross ordinarily monitors treatment of detainees, and this oversight has historically been a critical safeguard against abuse. But this order applies to interrogation at CIA “black sites,” secret prisons into which suspects are “disappeared” for years at a time, and from which the United States has barred the Red Cross or any other outside monitor. “Disappearances” are themselves a fundamental violation of international human rights, in large part because they facilitate abuse, yet this order allows that practice to continue unabated.

With a different administration and a different history, one might be less inclined to read President Bush’s latest executive order so skeptically. But this administration has shown repeatedly that it approaches the prohibitions on coercive interrogation the way a particularly creative tax lawyer might treat the tax code. Instead of striving to uphold what we thought were our country’s moral principles, the Bush administration seeks to exploit every loophole it can find or manufacture. As a result, the administration has lost the trust of the nation and of the rest of the world. Executive orders like this one are not likely to win it back.