Kill them before they breed again.

Frankly, I don't dare look to see if they followed through. I don't want to spoil the morning. But presumably the American Bar Association can follow suit, and call Yoo not-a-lawyer.--macgupta

Well, in October 2007 there was the Earlham Resolution:

Ethics Rebellion in Psychology, 10/12/07

This month, three psychology departments have gone on record saying that the association did not go far enough -- and that they consider it a violation of professional ethics to help the U.S. with interrogations in any prison outside the country where due process rights are not enforced. The votes on a resolution -- by the psychology faculties at Earlham, Guilford and Smith Colleges -- are an unusually public effort by departments to criticize collectively a key decision by their national association. A number of other departments are considering similar moves. http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/10/12/psych#Comments

The EarlhamResolution: RESOLUTION CONCERNING PARTICIPATION OF PSYCHOLOGISTS IN MILITARY DETENTION CENTERS http://www.ethicalapa.com/files/Earlham_Resolution_and_Letter.doc

More recently, Valtin at Invictus has been following the issue:

APA Ethics Policymaker Clarifies Defense of Torture; Reveals APA-Pentagon Link, 5/18/09

Dr. Stephen Soldz-“[…] The [Bryce] Lefever NPR interview created quite a stir among psychologists, including members of the APA’s Council of Representatives, as it revealed the questionable ethical reasoning of those chosen to form policy for the APA in this critical area. […] Another very important element of this letter is that it confirms the extensive collaboration between the APA and the military in the creation of the PENS task force. […] In putting Bryce Lefever, along with the other military-intelligence members, on the PENS task force and making them their “ethics” policy-makers, and in keeping their participation secret, the APA demonstrated the extremes to which they were willing to go to do the Bush administration’s bidding. […]” http://valtinsblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/apa-ethics-policymaker-clarifies.html

Two Psychologists at ACLU Blog of Rights, 6/24/09

Stephen Soldz-“[…] I outlined several modes of response to the issue of psychologist involvement in abusive interrogations by APA leadership. In brief, these modes of response, described in the approximate chronological order in which they were rolled out, were: Identification with the Aggressor; Rigging the Process; Denial; We are No Different Than Others; Parsing Pain; Repressive Tolerance and Endless "Dialog"; "We are Shocked!"

Trudy Bond-The last four presidents, as well as the APA Ethics Director Stephen Behnke, have repeatedly made the same politically correct statement for four years, with absolutely no actions to support their statements. It’s become clear that the APA peddles intellectual contradiction as policy when it comes to torture, with no intent of enforcement. http://valtinsblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/two-psychologists-at-aclu-blog-of.html

Top US Behavioral Scientists Studies Survival Schools to Create Torture Program Over 50 Years Ago, 6/25/09

The role of former APA presidents DeLeon, Koocher, Levant, Seligman, and Matarazzo in supporting the role of military psychologists in interrogations, even after evidence of torture by the U.S. government was manifest, is perhaps unequalled in the annals of professional societies, as providing political, and possibly organizational and theoretical or practical support to unethical procedures, especially torture. […] But that is not the end of the story; it is not even the beginning. […] Debility, Dependency and Dread [History from the 50’s]; […] If more brutal forms of torture sometimes were used, especially by over-eager foreign agents or governments, DDD remained the gold standard, the programmatic core of counterintelligence interrogation at the heart of the CIA's own intelligence manuals. […]” [Lots more there] http://valtinsblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/top-us-behavioral-scientists-studied.html

Human Rights Groups Critique APA’s Recent Statement on Interrogations, 6/29/09

“[…] a number of psychological, health, and human rights organizations released a statement criticizing the American Psychological Association (APA) Board of Directors failure to accept responsibility for the APA’s role in facilitating psychologists' participation in abusive national security interrogations. […]”

From the statement:

“[…] The authors speak as though the information about psychologist’s involvement in torture is fresh news even though it has been available for a long time. Even now, the Board relies on the Bush Administration tactic, employed in the Abu Ghraib debacle, of blaming the abuse on a "few bad apples." This minimization of the greatest ethical crisis in our profession’s history by those who claim to lead the profession is unacceptable. […] The study should explore how the APA governance system permits the accumulation of power in the hands of a very small number of individuals who are unresponsive to the general membership. It should also propose measures to return the APA to democratic principles, scientific integrity, and beneficence, including restructuring for greater transparency and the assimilation of diverse viewpoints. […]”

http://valtinsblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/human-rights-groups-critique-apas.html

Getting back to the Lawyers:

The National Lawyers Guild signed the above referenced letter to the APA. They have a “Working Group on Torture Accountability”. The link is: http://www.nlginternational.org/com/main.php?cid=18

Adnoto, are we more broken than Iran?

OK, maybe that is an unfair question.

Are we more broken than India?

India, broken?

Yes, in many profound ways. Compared to the US, too.

In my lifetime, Indira Gandhi seized dictatorial powers, during the period of the Emergency, 1975-77. Yet, parliamentary democracy was restored.

Public interest litigation is a recent phenomenon in India; as is the freedom of information. It was one of these public interest litigations that finally removed the illegality of gay sex in India, just a week or so ago.

There has been nothing of the scale of the Bhopal Union Carbide disaster in the US. India hardly has the framework to deal with it.

My cousin brother-in-law was murdered; shot in front of witnesses for exposing corruption on a railway contract. The killer was not even charged, let alone prosecuted, and sits pretty in political circles. Can this happen in the US?

An Indian court ruled recently that it is not illegal to refuse to rent to Muslims.

And so the fight goes on. And yet India is profoundly optimistic. Through my lifetime, it has been a dance of one step forward, one step back, mostly, and yet there is an overall forward motion.

If you were in India, I think, adnoto, you would have died of frustration, given the profound defeatism that you display here in this US of A, which in every level of governance, of law and of law enforcement, is more functional than India.

India can and does become better; the path for the US is not downwards either. Except in your mind.

So go bury yourself somewhere. You add no value to anything. The more I read of you, the more contemptible you seem.