Quick: where was the photo on the right taken?
No one could blame you if you guessed it's from one of the "secret CIA prisons" whose existence is being reported today.
After all, that is the legend that the Today show imposed over the photo. Katie Couric opened the show with it, ominously asking: "could there be another Abu Ghraib out there?"
In fact, the photo is from Abu Ghraib. But it was only when the same photo was displayed later in the half-hour that that fact clearly emerged.
Consider Today's cunning in choosing the photo it displayed. On the one hand, it is so lurid as to be sure to draw viewers' attention. On the other, Today avoided using one of the famous man-on-a-leash photos, since viewers would have immediately realized it was from Abu Ghraib.
Using this less-circulated, more generic photo made viewers more likely to assume it came from one of the secret CIA prisons.
Like other MSM, the Today show is clearly suffering from Abu Ghraib nostalgia - that heady time when daily, for weeks on end, the liberal media could air inflammatory photos, convinced that each time they did so President Bush took a hit.
An aside: if the locations of these prisons have surely been keep secret, just how secret has their existence been? Haven't we been told from the start that captured Al-Qaida are being kept at various secret locations around the world? What could those locations be other than some form of prison? Did people expect that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was being kept in Paris under an alias at the Ritz?
In a subsequent Matt Lauer interview, Jimmy Carter -- on to plump his new book "Our Endangered Values" -- was so quick to accuse his his own country and government that even Lauer was taken aback.
Said Carter: "The news this morning about torture around the world by Americans is going to [make a lot of news]."
To his credit, Lauer corrected the record for our Blame-America-First ex-prez:
"Well, the report as I read it this morning does not say that torture is going on but does say that there are some secret prisons being set up around the world."
