"He was worried about the moral injury that they had sustained, having participated in the torture of human beings," Garlasco notes.Ĭonversations with Human Rights Watch led Fishback to send a letter to Sen. Garlasco says Fishback was concerned about the Iraq victims of torture but also his own soldiers. "My concern was that these soldiers were being scapegoated and that we weren't being honest to Congress," Fishback told Hi-Phi Nation.įishback protested within his Army chain of command and continued to raise the issue for more than a year. So people were just basically making their own stuff up," Fishback later told the Hi-Phi Nation podcast.īy that time, the world had seen pictures from the Abu Ghraib scandal, but then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told Congress it was a simple matter of bad apples who would be punished, not a systematic problem with new U.S. "It wasn't just a problem that we weren't following the Geneva Conventions, it was a problem that there was no clear standard to replace the Geneva Conventions. It was in Iraq that he saw troops using "enhanced interrogation" tactics, including breaking prisoners' bones and stripping them naked in the freezing cold. Nothing ever came easy for him - he worked and got everything."įishback graduated from West Point with a bachelor's degree in Middle Eastern studies in 2001 and later deployed to Afghanistan and then Iraq with the Army's 82nd Airborne Division. He got almost all of that through just hard work. "A lot of those people have to plan most of their high school career for that. "There was no indication until he decided one day he'd go to West Point," Ford says. He wasn't an obvious candidate for a military career, says his boyhood friend Justin Ford. "It's a real damning, damning statement on 20 years of war and how we treat the veterans of this country."įishback grew up in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. "It's just hard for me to comprehend that this is how the life of Captain America would end, in mental anguish while being forcibly medicated in some facility," Garlasco says. "He was Captain America," says Marc Garlasco, a former Pentagon official who was at Human Rights Watch when Fishback reached out in 2005. 19 at age 42, as his friends and family scrambled to find him mental health care. He died broke, virtually homeless and medicated with heavy antipsychotic drugs in an adult foster care center near Kalamazoo, Mich., on Nov. in philosophy from the University of Michigan, and was named one of Time magazine's most influential people in 2005 for blowing the whistle on torture by the U.S. Ian Fishback graduated near the top of his West Point class, deployed four times to Iraq and Afghanistan, earned a Ph.D. troops who were torturing people in Iraq. Ian Fishback, seen in December 2019, deployed four times to Afghanistan and Iraq.
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