Retired Special Forces Major General Ian Fishback, seen in December 2019, deployed four times to Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2005, he blew the whistle for the US military torturing people in Iraq.
New America / Flickr
hide captions
switch captions
New America / Flickr
Retired Special Forces Major General Ian Fishback most recently graduated from the West Point class, deployed four times to Iraq and Afghanistan, earning a Ph. in philosophy from the University of Michigan, and was named one of the Time most influential people magazine in 2005 for blowing the whistle on US military torture.
He died in a dilapidated state, virtually homeless and on severe antipsychotic medication at an adult foster care center near Kalamazoo, Mich., on November 19 at age 42, when you His friends and family scrambled to find a place for him to get mental health care.
Marc Garlasco, a former Pentagon official who was at Human Rights Watch when Fishback was contacted in 2005, said: “He’s Captain America.
Garlasco said: “It was difficult for me to understand how Captain America’s life would end, in the mental anguish of being forced to give drugs at a certain facility. “It’s a truly damning statement about 20 years of war and the way we treat the veterans of this country.”
Fishback grew up on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. His childhood friend Justin Ford says he’s not an obvious candidate for a military career.
“There was no sign until he decided he would one day go to West Point,” Ford said. “A lot of those guys have had to plan most of their high school careers for that. He’s achieved almost all of that just through hard work. Nothing has come easy for him. he – he worked and had everything.”
Fishback graduated from West Point with a bachelor’s degree in Middle East studies in 2001 and was later deployed to Afghanistan and later Iraq with 82nd Army force.NS Airborne Division. It was in Iraq that he witnessed the military employing “enhanced interrogation” tactics, which included breaking prisoners’ bones and stripping them naked in the freezing cold.
“The problem is not only that we don’t follow the Geneva Conventions, it’s also that there is no clear standard to replace the Geneva Conventions. So basically people are just making their own. his own thing,” Fishback then told Hi-Africa Nation audio file.
At the time, the world had seen pictures of the Abu Ghraib scandal, but then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told Congress that it was simply a matter of the bad guys being punished, not the a systemic problem with the new US military policy.
“My concern is that these soldiers have been made scapegoats and that we have been dishonest with Congress,” Fishback told Hi-Phi Nation.
Fishback protested within his Army command and continued to raise the issue for over a year. Then he called Garlasco.
Garlasco said Fishback was concerned about Iraqi victims of torture but also his own soldiers. “He was concerned about the emotional trauma they suffered, having participated in the torture of people,” noted Garlasco.
Conversations with Human Rights Watch led Fishback to send a letter to Senator John McCain, concluding, “If we give up our ideals in the face of adversity and aggression, those ideals are never truly ours. I’d rather die fighting than fight back. dropped even the tiniest part of the idea of ’America’.” “
Fishback then met with McCain and many other members of Congress, who are credited with helping to overtake McCain The Treatment of Detainees Act 2005.
Being a whistleblower puts Fishback in a fragile position, as if he were completing an arduous selection process for the Army’s Special Forces. His sister, Jazcinda Jorgensen, says that Fishback is typical of carrying on despite the ups and downs.
“There’s right and wrong, and you do the right thing regardless of the cost,” she said.
According to Jorgensen, Fishback has always kept the different parts of his life separate, according to Jorgensen.
“My role in his life was that of an older sister. So he left a lot of things professional. A lot of people took him seriously, but he was silly,” she said, remembering. describe the way he reads books to her children and to his own. stepdaughter. (Fishback’s 2001 marriage to a teammate ended in divorce.)
“He would read to the children at night from Harry Potter or Winnie the Pooh, and it was fun to hear him do the voiceover,” said Jorgensen.
According to Army Lieutenant Colonel James Vizzard, Fishback deployed two more times to Iraq with the Task Force and did not lose his moral toughness. Vizzard will join Fishback in daily briefings with the US commanding general in Baghdad, where Fishback often turns down requests from the Special Forces general.
“You know, a lot of times, our generals want them to do things that aren’t part of their mandate,” Vizzard said. “And this is a very young captain facing a two-star champion, and a lot of times he has to basically say, ‘No, we’re not going to do that.”
But Fishback is losing faith in the American way of conducting the war in Iraq, focusing too much on direct action and not enough on building up Iraqi forces.
“It’s like being inside Catch-22, except that you have no overall justification for defeating the Nazis because you achieved nothing. You’d better kick the can in the street,” he told Hi-Phi Nation.
And Fishback feels that some of his teammates don’t trust him or think he’s soft on the enemy. He told the podcast that he was called a coward for opposing one mission but then reckless again for suggesting another.
“I said, ‘Look, man, I can’t be cowardly and reckless at the same time. You have to choose. And the difference between these two missions is that the last one is that you have to go shoot stuff and fly. around the helicopter. This one doesn’t. This is the most important type of mission for our field, so let’s get in the truck,” Fishback told Hi-Phi Nation.
In 2014, he left the army and studied for a Ph. in philosophy at the University of Michigan. That’s how he met Georgetown professor Nancy Sherman.
“I know him as a warrior-scholar, a philosopher of just war ethics, and as someone who turned to me as a confidant when he was in trouble,” Sherman said. .
She and other friends and family began to notice the tension. Fishback is giving national talks on philosophy and war and completing his doctoral thesis, but his behavior turns to paranoia. He claimed that other academics had stolen his work and talked about US government agencies pursuing him. Considering his credentials, friends did not immediately suspect him.
Ford, a childhood friend of his, said: “One of the problems with Ian was that some of his paranoia seemed very plausible. “You know, like if the FBI was spying on him and that makes sense, right? I mean, but if a normal person on the street told you that, you think they’re crazy.”
Sherman suggested that Fishback’s mental illness may have started during his tour of Iraq with the Special Forces, an intense group of brothers, where he did not always feel completely trusted.
“When there’s a real sense of betrayal of trust, it can lead to a kind of paranoia. You know, years on, I’ve seen this in Ian and it broke my heart,” Sherman said. shattered”.
His sister said he was out of medication and refused to receive care from the Department of Veterans Affairs or accept that he needed help.
After several public outbursts in his hometown of Newbury, Mich., a court ordered him to receive treatment and medication. He was placed in an adult foster care facility. His sister and friends started a GoFundMe campaign to get Fishback to a private psychiatric treatment program. At the same time, they lobbied the VA to find space for him – but the coronavirus pandemic has made it so Severe lack of mental health care even worse. On the evening of November 18, a “Veterans Service Navigator” from the Southwest Michigan Department of Behavioral Health visited Fishback. The next morning, Fishback was found dead. The cause is still unknown.
Hours after his death, according to his sister, the VA Medical Center in Battle Creek, Mich., called her to offer to help him.
“I will have you in my heart forever, but I think the country has lost a very powerful voice,” Justin Ford said.
“In the future, he became a very talented philosopher. We all remember the McCain incident, but he actually became a very powerful voice for the ethics of the way we are. And I think he’s going to be a really good voice for the ethics of how we handle mental illness.”
