Until recently few people had heard of “extraordinary rendition”, the practice of seizing terrorist suspects in foreign cities and spiriting them away to other countries to be interrogated. Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, will have wished that knowledge of the practice had remained confined to the intelligence community. Her tour of Europe last week was dogged by questions about rendition, which drew the response that US personnel were prohibited from the “cruel, inhumane and degrading” treatment of detainees.

That raises as many questions as it was supposed to answer. If this is the situation, why is Dick Cheney, the vice-president, fighting so hard against Senator John McCain’s bill proposing to outlaw such practices? Does her reassurance cover the handing of suspects to third party agents to be worked over? What about Khaled al-Masri, the German citizen who claims he was tortured while being held for five months by US agents in Afghanistan? Or the case in Milan, where judges are seeking the extradition from America of 22 CIA agents accused of premeditated kidnap on Italian streets?

The United Nations convention against torture, to which America is a signatory, bans intentionally inflicting severe mental or physical pain on detainees to obtain information. But US “enhanced interrogation” techniques, developed in the wake of 9/11, allow the “belly slap”, which can cause internal damage, and “long-time standing”, under which prisoners are made to stand, handcuffed and shackled, for up to 40 hours. Most controversially, they permit “water-boarding”— strapping a detainee to a board, wrapping his face with cellophane and pouring water to simulate the effects of drowning.

Britain’s law lords ruled last week against the use in courts of evidence that could have been obtained by torture. Lord Bingham, the former lord chief justice who headed the panel of seven law lords, said English law had abhorred “torture and its fruits” for more than 500 years and was “startled, even a little dismayed” by the suggestion that this should change. Lord Carswell said that the use of torture evidence would “involve the state in moral defilement”.

When George Bush declared a “war on terror” four years ago the way forward seemed clear. Terror networks had to be infiltrated and beaten from within. Countries that condoned or sponsored terrorism had to be made to see the errors of their ways. Overlaying all this was the need for the West to occupy the moral high ground. When governments descend to the level of the terrorists, the battle, which rests as much on political as military objectives, is lost. In taking captive in Iraq hostages such as Norman Kember, the British peace activist whose fate remains unclear this weekend, the terrorists see a moral equivalence to the allies having Arab prisoners. For us to use torture merely condones their brutality.

There are, of course, moral dilemmas here. The White House is understandably irritated by the holier than thou attitude of Europeans who would be the first to complain if suspects had knowledge of impending terrorist attacks in their cities which was not extracted from them. But we are rarely if ever talking about the “ticking time bomb” threat beloved of apologists for brutality. Information obtained by “enhanced interrogation” is also quite likely to be so unreliable as to be of no use. False evidence of links between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda was provided by a terror suspect who was handed over by the United States to Egypt for interrogation three years ago.

President Bush had a noble vision to promote democracy and introduce the rule of law to the Middle East, inspired by the idea that the United States is “a shining city upon a hill”. That nation was built on the enlightenment rejection of arbitrary justice. To tolerate torture betrays that great republic’s founding fathers.