If Everbody's talking about it, then it cannot be 'The elephant in the living room.'
The term "Elephant in the living room" refers to some nasty business that everybody pretends isn't there. In short, this phrase refers to denial, or as Wikipedia puts it:
...an English idiom for an obvious truth that is being ignored or goes unaddressed. It is based on the idea that an elephant in a room would be impossible to overlook; thus, people in the room who pretend the elephant is not there might be concerning themselves with relatively small and even irrelevant matters, compared to the looming big one.
Sorry to be perhaps fussily precise, but if everybody is chattering about something, then it can't be an elephant in the room, but it might well be a Red Herring, which is a literary or logical device to distract attention from some other, perhaps central issue.
If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything.
—Confucius (K'ung fu tzu)
Source
Typically, everybody seems to be using the torture issue to bash the other side, without even addressing the related, perhaps more important question of whether or not anything valuable was actually gained from these methods. There was a (former?) CIA guy on with one of the talking heads the other night who allowed that the Agency had much better methods of extracting information, as one might imagine.
Of course, nobody is ever going to admit that they are falling for one of the oldest tricks, and that is misdirection - The Red Herring - the secret to many magic tricks.
S