For the second time in a few days, Couric has run a lopsided piece on the use of torture in military interrogation.
Last Thursday, Today aired a segment in which three people expressed their views on torture, and, surprise!, they all condemned its use. We first heard from a sensitive soul from "Human Rights Watch." Next was a former CIA lawyer appointed by Bill Clinton, and finally . . . John McCain.
When Katie brought the discussion back into the studio, you might have thought her guest, former FBI official Joe Navarro, was there to provide some balance to the preceding calvalcade of condemnation. But no! Navarro gleefully piled on with yet another condemnation of torture. Katie, renowned interrogation expert that she is, weighed in with her own view that torture yields unreliable information, eventually letting it be known she was in turn relying on . . . McCain!
Katie was back on the torture beat this morning, and back with her was Navarro. Couric began by blithely parroting the allegation by disgruntled former Colin Powell aide Larry Wilkerson that VP Cheney:
"provided the philosophical guidance that led to torture and suggested it may still be going on in US-run facilities."
This is the same Wilkerson who a few weeks ago publicly pouted about "a cabal" between the Vice-President of the United States and the Secretary of Defense, stamping his foot because "the bureaucracy" did not know about all the decisions that were being made.
Powell, himself a MSM fave, rejected Wilkerson's allegations, but for once Katie wasn't paying deference to the former Secretary of State, instead choosing to pass along without further comment Wilkerson's slanderous accusations.
In any case, Navarro was there to demonstrate good interrogation technique by interrogating Katie herself. And by "getting into her personal space" he was in short order able to get Couric to admit . . . that she was from Arlington, Virginia, had earlier in her career worked for a local station in Miami, and would like to visit Australia's Great Barrier Reef.
Case closed! If Navarro was able to get Katie to cough up that kind of highly revealing information, surely nothing stronger than a stern look in the eye would ever be needed to get a captured member of Al-Qaida's suicide squad to give up the location of a ticking nuclear weapon hidden in a US city.
