Barack Obama must beware of playing party politics with security - Telegraph

Barack Obama must beware of playing party politics with security - Telegraph: "But a change of leadership at the White House does not mean the world has suddenly become a safer place. Al-Qaeda is still devising plots, the Taliban continues to murder coalition forces and rogue states such as North Korea, Syria and Iran persist with efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction while supporting Islamist terror groups.

So Mr Obama must take care when he attempts to score cheap political points on national security issues, as he did last week with his unnecessary decision to release previously classified details of the legal opinions authorising the use of the extreme interrogation techniques – torture, to you and me – that were drawn up by the Bush administration. Apart from highlighting the sophistry Bush's lawyers used to justify the inexcusable, there is little new in the revelations that the CIA had used White House-sanctioned methods of torture – such as water-boarding, in which a detainee suffers simulated drowning.

The Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib scandals provide graphic examples of how the Bush administration lost the plot over its handling of terror suspects. But the fast tempo of the global campaign against Islamist-inspired terrorism means that all this is ancient history. Abu Ghraib is now run by Iraqis, who don't share the West's qualms about mistreatment of prisoners; and Guantanamo will be closed by the end of the year. Torture and extraordinary rendition are practices that ceased long before the Bush administration left office."