Straw Renders it Straight

For those who remain insufficiently reassured by Condoleezza Rice's assertion that the US does not practise anything that the US would define as torture, good news. A grey suit in the Foreign Office has been unable to find any evidence that the CIA has been using Britain as a stopover on "extraordinary rendition" flights, except perhaps once or twice during the bad old days of the Clinton administration.

"Careful research," the suit informed the BBC, "has been unable to identify any occasion ... when we have received a request for permission by the United States for a rendition through the United Kingdom territory or airspace." So even if the flights would have been illegal, which they wouldn't, they weren't even here in the first place. Furthermore, according to the aviation minister, "if these aircraft landed in the UK they were either not involved in civil commercial transport or were stopping for technical purposes, for example to refuel". So even if the flights had come here, which they didn't, they clearly wouldn't have been doing anything wrong. This is certainly reassuring.

The suit's very own people have "checked through all the detail" of the allegations, and have "found no records relating to any policy considerations" whereby the White House asked us to facilitate some renditionising and we, after our usual fashion, said fine. No requests for passage from Transworld Torture Airways have been recorded; no khaki-clad stewardesses have been heard to say, "Now let's just tighten these straps, and then I'll extinguish my cigarette". Naturally, if the CIA had been using our airports for the purpose of flying people off to be tortured, they would have asked nicely, in writing, before doing so. They certainly would not have omitted to ask Jack Straw. The poodle's consent can be taken as read, of course; but one cannot be so sure about his fleas.