Off-topic: Where is the Outcry Over APA Torture Support?

A news story broke this week that should trouble a lot of people, but it doesn't appear to be making a ripple. What gives?

TIME Magazine reported on April 30, 2015 that evidence had surfaced implicating the American Psychological Association in working behind the scenes with the George W. Bush administration to justify "enhanced interrogation" (i.e. torture) practices they knew (or should have known) were unethical. The report, which APA denies, claims the organization created an ethical policy on national security interrogation that rubber-stamped the administration's policies. This is extremely sad if true, since psychologists should have known the abuses that would take place in a setting like Abu Ghraib, Iraq.

Some three decades before Abu Ghraib, the psychologist Dr. Philip Zimbardo had glimpsed the future when he conducted the now-infamous Stanford Prison Experiment. That experiment assigned one group of experimental subjects as "jailers" and another group as "prisoners," and left them alone to see what would happen. Zimbardo had to stop the experiment well before the scheduled ending time out of concern that the "prisoners" might suffer irreparable physical and emotional harm at the hands of the jailers, who lost all control of their behavior. The result proved beyond doubt Lord Acton's declaration that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The frightening aspect to me is the thought that an organization representing the mental health profession in the United States and Canada might rubber-stamp harmful acts committed in the name of national security (which our government has since discontinued amid a storm of criticism). In this day and age, with evidence mounting of police using excessive force in cities across the United States with apparent impunity, the last thing we need is to distrust the psychological profession. These accusations need to be aired so the public can judge for itself whether APA has violated its own ethics. But I didn't see it on the news last night. Other than in a feed from Yahoo yesterday morning, it's disappeared from the news cycle radar. It looks to me like coverup and stonewalling by APA and complicity by the major media outlets. Where's the outcry?