Leading article: Blair must answer on torture

One of the Prime Minister's defining features is a selective lack of curiosity. It never occurred to him, apparently, to ask whether the weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein could deploy within 45 minutes were long-range or battlefield missiles. It turned out that they did not exist at all, but while they were thought to exist they were definitely of the short-range variety.

Now Tony Blair does not want to inquire too closely into the Bush administration's use of torture in the "war on terror". He accepts the assurances of Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, despite the instant deconstruction of her careful words. Perhaps that is pragmatic statecraft. If our principal ally is engaged in a spot of light torture in dark corners around the world, or arm's-length torture contracted out to governments in Egypt or Uzbekistan, it might be argued that private pressure would be most effective. This newspaper would not agree, but we can see that Mr Blair could make and win that argument with himself.

He could point out to George Bush, privately, that American attempts to rewrite dictionary definitions of torture to exclude aggressive interrogation techniques (including simulated drowning, known as waterboarding) are counterproductive. He could say that America's willingness to send suspects to be tortured elsewhere, and to use the so-called intelligence thus obtained, undermines the moral authority of democracies in the struggle against terrorists. We have no way of knowing how effective a restraining influence Mr Blair has been on Mr Bush over the past few years. It is difficult to see, although he did not bomb al-Jazeera in Qatar, how Mr Bush could have done more to inflame the Muslim resentment against the West on which jihadist terrorism draws.

Our preference is for such things to be conducted in the open: for Mr Blair to say to Mr Bush, in public, that torture is banned by several international agreements to which the US is party, and that he trusts the President is urgently investigating all the allegations of US complicity in its use. It was, after all, the very public pressure from Senator John McCain that finally forced Mr Bush to agree to the accepted international definition of torture being written into US law.

Mr Blair cannot be allowed to regard this issue as simply a matter of tactics, however, when British complicity in the use of torture is at issue. Yet he has never given a straight answer when asked whether the US has been allowed to use British airports to transport prisoners to secret American prisons or to third countries. At one point he waved aside concerns expressed by Charles Kennedy, the former leader of the Liberal Democrats, saying: "The idea that we should investigate every time that a United States government plane flies into this country is completely absurd." As ever, he set up a false characterisation of the question put to him so that he could knock it down.

At no point has Mr Blair asked the US administration for assurances that prisoners who might be subject to torture, either on the pre- or post-McCain definition, have not passed through this country. Now the basis of his lack of curiosity has been exposed. A Foreign Office memo to No 10, obtained by the New Statesman, reveals that the Prime Minister was advised to "avoid getting drawn on detail". Two of the most important of those details are the questions of "whether the US practises torture" and "whether the UK is complicit in it". Instead, Mr Blair is advised to rely on the "strong US statements" in Ms Rice's speech in which she said her government stood by national and international law. So he did.

But the Prime Minister has received other advice. In November, a noted human rights lawyer said: "It can never be justified for the Government to torture a person or to have a person tortured. Despite sometimes causing governments difficulty, [that principle] is an absolute." That was Cherie Booth, QC. She was right. We are encouraged that Sir Menzies Campbell, who writes on these pages, continues to try to hold the Prime Minister to account. As Salman Rushdie also writes here, words matter. The phrase "extraordinary rendition" is one of the worst euphemisms of our time. The British Government should have nothing to do with it and Mr Blair must come clean about what it has had to do with it so far.