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Probably, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did the best she could when confronted with questions regarding the hottest bilateral issue of the hour. Asked during her visit to Thailand this week to comment on the Washington Post's latest reports of an American "torture chamber" on Thai soil, she said she would rather let the past be the past, although the Obama administration would totally respect all international human rights principles when it comes to treating terrorist suspects.

Secretary of State Clinton said she would rather not comment on "intelligence" affairs and stressed that her attitude should not be interpreted as a "yes" or "no" answer to the question of whether the allegations are true.

Because the alleged practices of American interrogators took place during the previous Bush administration, Clinton has the small luxury of being able to be somewhat elusive. And she seemed to handle the political and diplomatic sides of the issue better than Thai officials, whose blunt denials about the existence of an American secret facility have never wavered.

In other words, the Washington Post's stories fly more in the face of the Thai versions of events than those of the Obama administration.

Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva and Deputy Prime Minister Thaugsuban have denied that Bangkok and Washington had ever collaborated to torture suspected terrorists.

Asean Affairs Department director Vitavas Srivihok said the Post's latest report might be aimed at discrediting Thailand as the chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Foreign Affairs Minister Kasit Piromya was quoted as saying that the report was groundless and that Thailand had never let the United States build a torture facility on its soil.

Diplomatically and politically, Clinton may have scored 7 out of 10 and the Thais only 4. Problem is, this issue is as much a moral one as it is a diplomatic one. And no amount of diplomacy can blur the real moral questions, the biggest one being whether what the Americans (allegedly) did is right or wrong.

To be fair to the Thai government, what is the better option between totally dismissing the allegations or making itself and the whole country a political - or worse - target of the Muslim world? Saying "Yes, we have allowed suspected Islamic militants to be tortured here" will have unknown consequences that nobody wants to discover.

Thailand, like America, has a responsibility to respect human rights, but which country is better poised to fulfil that responsibility? That Hillary Clinton seemed to come out of it better diplomatically does not mean that responsibility has been fulfilled as far as the Americans are concerned. Most of all, the crux of this issue involves something that has allegedly taken place behind guarded walls. What happens at a press conference podium is a mere sideshow.

What Clinton said during her visit to Thailand will matter only if she and the new US administration mean it and follow up with tangible action. The previous American government's mindset was not "We will try not to do it", but "We have to do it and we have to figure out a way not to get caught". The Bush administration brushed aside moral implications regarding torturing suspects, and concentrated on evading legal and constitutional difficulties. Since the American interrogators would have faced those obstacles if suspects were tortured inside the United States, the alleged militants had to be flown to a far-flung country for the rough treatment.

So, we can only hope that when Clinton said that America would from now adhere to "open, internationally accepted norms", she meant that American officials will not go anywhere else and do anything that is legally and constitutionally unacceptable in the United States. We hope she meant that even if legal loopholes exist in certain countries to allow any action that is unacceptable in America, the United States would not take advantage of them.

There are a number of moral matters that Clinton has raised during her "America is back to Asia" visit. The Burmese junta, North Korea and Iran have done things that are very morally wrong in the eyes of Washington. Democracy and human rights are what Americans preach, if not demand, wherever they go, and there is hardly any compromise when it's others who commit offences.

The "torture chamber", if it existed, is something different. It's something in which simple morals were sacrificed for what has been described as greater morals, and it is not backed by America's own legal and constitutional principles. If America really means to come back to Asia for the long haul, it has to do so as Hillary Clinton promises - on an equal footing and outside any dark chamber.