8 ms·

The final, anguished years of a warrior-scholar who exposed torture by US troops

175 points by indigodaddy 5y ago

tristor 5y ago
It's not nice to hear, but the reality is, we treat most veterans even worse than this. The VA is an abysmal failure, and its failure, especially in the arena of mental healthcare, is a primary driving factor why many homeless men in the US are veterans. Going to war takes a serious and long-lasting toll on a person, and an even deeper toll when you are someone who allows yourself to consider and struggle with the ethics and morals of war. This country needs to wrestle with and resolve its treatment of veterans. More than any other nation, the United States has been encaptured by the military-industrial complex, and we treat the millions of people who are driven through this complex as less than dirt, discarding them as husks of their former selves without any recourse or support once they no longer serve that complex. No less a luminary than Eisenhower[1] and Smedley Butler[2] warned us clearly that the military-industrial complex would lead to this, that war is a racket, and that our society was trending in a direction where it was acceptable to utterly destroy the lives of men so that a few may profit. It is very sad that this is the end, at such a young age, of this man. [1]: https://www.npr.org/2011/01/17/132942244/ikes-warning-of-military-expansion-50-years-later https://www.npr.org/2011/01/17/132942244/ikes-warning-of-mil... [2]: https://archive.org/details/War_Is_A_Racket https://archive.org/details/War_Is_A_Racket
- GartzenDeHaes 5y ago
  The truth is often the opposite of often repeated propaganda. People in the military and veterans are treated as disposable and easily replaceable human resources. Source: I'm a veteran.
- ZanyProgrammer 5y ago
  I’m not really sure this is a VA specific failure. Lots of people fall through the cracks with mental health care, cliched century old Smedley Butler quotes or not. I’m not seeing anything specific about the VA failing him.
- FpUser 5y ago
  >"our society was trending in a direction where it was acceptable to utterly destroy the lives of men so that a few may profit" Not trending. It's always been this way. And not limited to military. Plenty of examples when human live was ruined without any recourse.
- spamizbad 5y ago
  I would argue that you cannot paper over the horrors of war with government programs or culture or patriotism or whatever. If you want to go to war you need to be willing to accept you're going to permanently damage a segment of your population. This doesn't mean don't fund the VA or try to improve/reform it, but if your benchmark for a successful veterans organization is a majority of people just simply cope with their trauma with limited impact on their lives.... that just doesn't seem realistic. Something to think about before you tell your local politicians you support armed conflict. Abstinence works well in this situation.
  - rectang 5y ago
    I was out to dinner with an uncle of mine sometime in the aughts, and there were 2 US Marines eating at another table; because of the national situation at the time, we knew they were about to ship out. My uncle bought their dinner, and they came over and seemed very grateful at the appreciation shown them. But what really struck me was what my uncle said after they went back to their table. "We're asking them to go over there and kill people." Not "... and risk their lives", but "... and kill people".
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- mistrial9 5y ago
  an ex-army Vietnam veteran here in Calif. became a lawyer and took a lot of art classes.. he eventually learned to game the VA system and get endless cases of common medicines, plus the hard stuff, which he used vigorously. I found him dead, in filthy conditions, but he seemed OK with it since he made his own choices, and was medicated beyond belief as he died of regular bad health.
- MisterTea 5y ago
  They have heads filled with more horrors than you can imagine. I feel so bad for them as I have a few vet friends, most of whom have combat experience from Iraq and Afghanistan. Ive heard all the horror stories and watched the toughest guy I know break down in tears over what he did to people. One friend accidentally shot a child dead and has to live with that until he dies. They all came back different. They all moved away to the country side far from cities. They all know one or more fellow veterans who took their life because they could not live with these horrors. They use these men and women to do their vile dirty work then throw them away when they're done.
CIAspook 5y ago
Neutralized
the-dude 5y ago
Whistleblowing in general tends to not end well.
rectang 5y ago
> 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. military policy. Fischback's story is symptomatic of how the US treats whistleblowers: once you go down that road, you will be alone, shunned, with a meager safety net and with a crippled ability to make a living. For all of the hoo ha about American individualism, organizations are sacrosanct and individuals are devalued: in the courts, in government, in the workplace, and in culture.
- the-dude 5y ago
  Has nothing to do with the US, is the same everywhere. A whislteblower has acted against 'the group'. Nobody will want to touch you anymore.
  - rectang 5y ago
    The big difference between the US and elsewhere is the hypocrisy. To a greater degree than other societies, the US mythologizes the individual, and so the gap between myth and reality is even wider. I would like it to be different. I would like the US to live up to its ideals and aspirations. Concretely, I wish that Ian Fishback had received rewards commensurate with his service and contributions — at the very least a comfortable life.
    - the-dude 5y ago
      Oh, when will American Exceptionalism finally die already? In The Netherlands, our government even setup a 'Whistleblowers house / safehaven' to 'encourage' whistleblowers. You still get treated like shit, be blackholed, unable to find work, your taxes scrutinized etc. It is really a deep psychological thing : you acted against 'the group'. Whatever words are spoken or laws are enacted, this is what counts. Has nothing to do with the US.
    - brandonmenc 5y ago
      > the US mythologizes the individual Well, part of this mythology is that the true individual often takes the less-traveled harder road.
jtdev 5y ago
Why have we culturally accepted the states harsh treatment of our courageous whistleblowers? No monuments, no history book lessons... the state is evil and corrupt to the core.
georgecmu 5y ago
It was in Iraq that he saw troops using "enhanced interrogation" tactics, including breaking prisoners' bones and stripping them naked in the freezing cold. Where can we read more about this? This must have been a huge International Crimes Court war crime prosecution effort; I'm surprised I missed it in the news. How many years in jail were those responsible sentenced to?
- mistrial9 5y ago
  it is so awful that there are real reasons not to pass the material around in public.. plenty of people here in the USA protested this extensively .. Your good-looking world leader and mine, Vice Pres. Dick Cheney, was the executive in charge here
- SapporoChris 5y ago
  Here's a good place to start reading. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisoner_abuse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisone...
- hencq 5y ago
  You're probably being sarcastic and I completely agree that it's scandalous that those responsible (like Cheney) got away with it, but it was all over the news at the time.
  - StanislavPetrov 5y ago
    They didn't just, "get away with it", they were promoted to the highest levels of society. "Bloody" Gina Haspel, one of the CIA agents running the torture camps (where she earned her nickname) was promoted by the two subsequent presidents and eventually became head of the CIA! The worst peddlers of WMD/war propaganda in the media were promoted to the highest positions of power. People like Jeffrey Goldberg who is today the editor in chief of The Atlantic. The Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations who supported the illegal invasion and rallied support among his fellow Democrats to ensure that a majority of them voted to support it is now President of the United States. And on the flip side of the coin, one of the people who blew the whistle on US war crimes in Iraq with the release of the "collateral murder" video (among many others), Julian Assange, has been rotting in a UK dungeon for years.
AlbertCory 5y ago
How many actual veterans of the post-911 wars do you know? If the answer is "zero" maybe sit down. I interviewed 23 or so of them [1]. Operation Code has about 6,000 members AFAIK. There's one guy whom I encouraged a lot; he worked at Amazon for awhile and just recently accepted a job at Google in New York. He thanked me for the help, which really made my day. Is this typical? No, of course not, but then, you won't see NPR doing a story about them, either. I did have one interviewee who was having a really hard time, living with his wife and four (!) kids in a homeless shelter. Generally the other vets go out of their way to help these poor guys, and sometimes they get civilian jobs on military bases. Almost always when you ask them why they joined up, "college benefits" heads the list. OC was instrumental in making code schools eligible for GI benefits, and from what I can tell, those things really work. One guy said he had a friend who was getting job offers before he even finished the 12 weeks. [1] https://operationcode.org/podcast https://operationcode.org/podcast
- rectang 5y ago
  > How many actual veterans of the post-911 wars do you know? If the answer is "zero" maybe sit down. I have several in my extended family, thank you very much. Nevertheless, I object to excluding people from this discussion, whether they live in a country which did not send solders to those wars, or whether they are US citizens who are not directly connected to the military but nevertheless participate in our democracy.
- tristor 5y ago
  All of my neighbors, and everyone in my friends group, and most of the people I interact with on a daily basis either served in the military or were civilian employees and contractors of the DoD during the most recent war or a prior war. That is part of why I feel so strongly on this issue. I did not serve, although I attempted to enlist I was denied for medical reasons during MEPS. Possibly out of some form of survivors guilt for seeing how horrible the impact of war has been on my friends and people in my community, I consider it the only responsible thing to do to continue speaking out about the reality of our military-industrial complex. A lot of the corruption in the US government surrounds defense and industry, and it is simply the truth that we treat veterans horribly, many people in the military joined because they came from underprivileged backgrounds and needed a way out, and we send them into horrifying situations and simply discard them when they get home. The GI Bill does not in any way soothe or absolve this nation of the way it treats its veterans or our ceaseless desire for war in the first place.
leroy_masochist 5y ago
RIP. Some ugly truths are surfaced by the case of Major Fishback: - People who are motivated to do hard things like go to West Point and SFAS sometimes have mental health issues; anecdotally, would say maybe even at a higher rate than the general population - People who have found their "mission in life" often can be pretty abrasive about it, alienating friends and former colleagues -- especially when it's a "moral imperative" mission like ending detainee abuse - In the social environment of an infantry platoon and/or ODA, contra what they tell you in the officer pipeline, "just doing the right thing" isn't enough; you have to do the right thing AND sell your guys on why it's the right thing. Fishback clearly failed to do the latter, especially as an ODA commander. Having your guys criticize you as both too timid and too aggressive isn't an indictment of their ability to think rationally, it's a sign you've lost their trust and confidence - The veteran mental health care system remains generally fucked, largely because the animating force behind the VA is CYA, not a bona fide desire to help patients. If their CYA interests converge with what you need, you'll get great care. If not, you can slip through the cracks, as Fishback did - On a related note, veterans can be a difficult bunch and VA mental health people are often overworked and cynical. In the case of someone like Fishback who was in crisis and probably not the easiest person to interact with, it is sad but not surprising that his care team was lackadaisical about following up and getting him the care he needed
- metabagel 5y ago
  - People who have found their "mission in life" often can be pretty abrasive about it, alienating friends and former colleagues -- especially when it's a "moral imperative" mission like ending detainee abuse -------------------- Let's call it "prisoner abuse", please. The word "detainee" should refer to someone who is in temporary custody.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - webmaven 5y ago
    > The word "detainee" should refer to someone who is in temporary custody. We need a new word for people held indefinitely (technically temporarily, but with practically infinite renewals of a 'limited' term by a compliant judiciary). There will be an expansion of the sort of exigent circumstances used as justification for such treatment. This seems like a recurring antipattern, as with IP maximalists pushing for 'forever minus a day'[0] copyright terms (which, thankfully, seems to have abated, with works now entering the public domain every year). [0] http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2009-December/094574.html http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2009-Decemb...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
fnord77 5y ago
Fuck NPR. They refused to call waterboarding “torture”
CosmicCarl 5y ago
How curious and convenient for the U.S. government that so many of these people who expose their government's espionage, sabotage, murder of women and children, crimes of war, just happen to end up in prison or die at an early age.
trinsic2 5y ago
Thanks for posting this. I want to remember there were people who tried to bring awareness to what we have become. 50 or 100 years from now, the next generation can look back on what happened and I hope they make different choices. IMHO this is a systemic problem with the evolution of our species.

175 points by indigodaddy 5y ago

It's not nice to hear, but the reality is, we treat most veterans even worse than this. The VA is an abysmal failure, and its failure, especially in the arena of mental healthcare, is a primary driving factor why many homeless men in the US are veterans. Going to war takes a serious and long-lasting toll on a person, and an even deeper toll when you are someone who allows yourself to consider and struggle with the ethics and morals of war. This country needs to wrestle with and resolve its treatment of veterans. More than any other nation, the United States has been encaptured by the military-industrial complex, and we treat the millions of people who are driven through this complex as less than dirt, discarding them as husks of their former selves without any recourse or support once they no longer serve that complex. No less a luminary than Eisenhower[1] and Smedley Butler[2] warned us clearly that the military-industrial complex would lead to this, that war is a racket, and that our society was trending in a direction where it was acceptable to utterly destroy the lives of men so that a few may profit. It is very sad that this is the end, at such a young age, of this man. [1]: https://www.npr.org/2011/01/17/132942244/ikes-warning-of-military-expansion-50-years-later https://www.npr.org/2011/01/17/132942244/ikes-warning-of-mil... [2]: https://archive.org/details/War_Is_A_Racket https://archive.org/details/War_Is_A_Racket

GartzenDeHaes 5y ago
The truth is often the opposite of often repeated propaganda. People in the military and veterans are treated as disposable and easily replaceable human resources. Source: I'm a veteran.
ZanyProgrammer 5y ago
I’m not really sure this is a VA specific failure. Lots of people fall through the cracks with mental health care, cliched century old Smedley Butler quotes or not. I’m not seeing anything specific about the VA failing him.
FpUser 5y ago
>"our society was trending in a direction where it was acceptable to utterly destroy the lives of men so that a few may profit" Not trending. It's always been this way. And not limited to military. Plenty of examples when human live was ruined without any recourse.
spamizbad 5y ago
I would argue that you cannot paper over the horrors of war with government programs or culture or patriotism or whatever. If you want to go to war you need to be willing to accept you're going to permanently damage a segment of your population. This doesn't mean don't fund the VA or try to improve/reform it, but if your benchmark for a successful veterans organization is a majority of people just simply cope with their trauma with limited impact on their lives.... that just doesn't seem realistic. Something to think about before you tell your local politicians you support armed conflict. Abstinence works well in this situation.
- rectang 5y ago
  I was out to dinner with an uncle of mine sometime in the aughts, and there were 2 US Marines eating at another table; because of the national situation at the time, we knew they were about to ship out. My uncle bought their dinner, and they came over and seemed very grateful at the appreciation shown them. But what really struck me was what my uncle said after they went back to their table. "We're asking them to go over there and kill people." Not "... and risk their lives", but "... and kill people".
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
mistrial9 5y ago
an ex-army Vietnam veteran here in Calif. became a lawyer and took a lot of art classes.. he eventually learned to game the VA system and get endless cases of common medicines, plus the hard stuff, which he used vigorously. I found him dead, in filthy conditions, but he seemed OK with it since he made his own choices, and was medicated beyond belief as he died of regular bad health.
MisterTea 5y ago
They have heads filled with more horrors than you can imagine. I feel so bad for them as I have a few vet friends, most of whom have combat experience from Iraq and Afghanistan. Ive heard all the horror stories and watched the toughest guy I know break down in tears over what he did to people. One friend accidentally shot a child dead and has to live with that until he dies. They all came back different. They all moved away to the country side far from cities. They all know one or more fellow veterans who took their life because they could not live with these horrors. They use these men and women to do their vile dirty work then throw them away when they're done.

CIAspook 5y ago

Neutralized

the-dude 5y ago

Whistleblowing in general tends to not end well.

rectang 5y ago

> 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. military policy. Fischback's story is symptomatic of how the US treats whistleblowers: once you go down that road, you will be alone, shunned, with a meager safety net and with a crippled ability to make a living. For all of the hoo ha about American individualism, organizations are sacrosanct and individuals are devalued: in the courts, in government, in the workplace, and in culture.

the-dude 5y ago
Has nothing to do with the US, is the same everywhere. A whislteblower has acted against 'the group'. Nobody will want to touch you anymore.
- rectang 5y ago
  The big difference between the US and elsewhere is the hypocrisy. To a greater degree than other societies, the US mythologizes the individual, and so the gap between myth and reality is even wider. I would like it to be different. I would like the US to live up to its ideals and aspirations. Concretely, I wish that Ian Fishback had received rewards commensurate with his service and contributions — at the very least a comfortable life.
  - the-dude 5y ago
    Oh, when will American Exceptionalism finally die already? In The Netherlands, our government even setup a 'Whistleblowers house / safehaven' to 'encourage' whistleblowers. You still get treated like shit, be blackholed, unable to find work, your taxes scrutinized etc. It is really a deep psychological thing : you acted against 'the group'. Whatever words are spoken or laws are enacted, this is what counts. Has nothing to do with the US.
  - brandonmenc 5y ago
    > the US mythologizes the individual Well, part of this mythology is that the true individual often takes the less-traveled harder road.

jtdev 5y ago

Why have we culturally accepted the states harsh treatment of our courageous whistleblowers? No monuments, no history book lessons... the state is evil and corrupt to the core.

georgecmu 5y ago

It was in Iraq that he saw troops using "enhanced interrogation" tactics, including breaking prisoners' bones and stripping them naked in the freezing cold. Where can we read more about this? This must have been a huge International Crimes Court war crime prosecution effort; I'm surprised I missed it in the news. How many years in jail were those responsible sentenced to?

mistrial9 5y ago
it is so awful that there are real reasons not to pass the material around in public.. plenty of people here in the USA protested this extensively .. Your good-looking world leader and mine, Vice Pres. Dick Cheney, was the executive in charge here
SapporoChris 5y ago
Here's a good place to start reading. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisoner_abuse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisone...
hencq 5y ago
You're probably being sarcastic and I completely agree that it's scandalous that those responsible (like Cheney) got away with it, but it was all over the news at the time.
- StanislavPetrov 5y ago
  They didn't just, "get away with it", they were promoted to the highest levels of society. "Bloody" Gina Haspel, one of the CIA agents running the torture camps (where she earned her nickname) was promoted by the two subsequent presidents and eventually became head of the CIA! The worst peddlers of WMD/war propaganda in the media were promoted to the highest positions of power. People like Jeffrey Goldberg who is today the editor in chief of The Atlantic. The Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations who supported the illegal invasion and rallied support among his fellow Democrats to ensure that a majority of them voted to support it is now President of the United States. And on the flip side of the coin, one of the people who blew the whistle on US war crimes in Iraq with the release of the "collateral murder" video (among many others), Julian Assange, has been rotting in a UK dungeon for years.

AlbertCory 5y ago

How many actual veterans of the post-911 wars do you know? If the answer is "zero" maybe sit down. I interviewed 23 or so of them [1]. Operation Code has about 6,000 members AFAIK. There's one guy whom I encouraged a lot; he worked at Amazon for awhile and just recently accepted a job at Google in New York. He thanked me for the help, which really made my day. Is this typical? No, of course not, but then, you won't see NPR doing a story about them, either. I did have one interviewee who was having a really hard time, living with his wife and four (!) kids in a homeless shelter. Generally the other vets go out of their way to help these poor guys, and sometimes they get civilian jobs on military bases. Almost always when you ask them why they joined up, "college benefits" heads the list. OC was instrumental in making code schools eligible for GI benefits, and from what I can tell, those things really work. One guy said he had a friend who was getting job offers before he even finished the 12 weeks. [1] https://operationcode.org/podcast https://operationcode.org/podcast

rectang 5y ago
> How many actual veterans of the post-911 wars do you know? If the answer is "zero" maybe sit down. I have several in my extended family, thank you very much. Nevertheless, I object to excluding people from this discussion, whether they live in a country which did not send solders to those wars, or whether they are US citizens who are not directly connected to the military but nevertheless participate in our democracy.
tristor 5y ago
All of my neighbors, and everyone in my friends group, and most of the people I interact with on a daily basis either served in the military or were civilian employees and contractors of the DoD during the most recent war or a prior war. That is part of why I feel so strongly on this issue. I did not serve, although I attempted to enlist I was denied for medical reasons during MEPS. Possibly out of some form of survivors guilt for seeing how horrible the impact of war has been on my friends and people in my community, I consider it the only responsible thing to do to continue speaking out about the reality of our military-industrial complex. A lot of the corruption in the US government surrounds defense and industry, and it is simply the truth that we treat veterans horribly, many people in the military joined because they came from underprivileged backgrounds and needed a way out, and we send them into horrifying situations and simply discard them when they get home. The GI Bill does not in any way soothe or absolve this nation of the way it treats its veterans or our ceaseless desire for war in the first place.

leroy_masochist 5y ago

RIP. Some ugly truths are surfaced by the case of Major Fishback: - People who are motivated to do hard things like go to West Point and SFAS sometimes have mental health issues; anecdotally, would say maybe even at a higher rate than the general population - People who have found their "mission in life" often can be pretty abrasive about it, alienating friends and former colleagues -- especially when it's a "moral imperative" mission like ending detainee abuse - In the social environment of an infantry platoon and/or ODA, contra what they tell you in the officer pipeline, "just doing the right thing" isn't enough; you have to do the right thing AND sell your guys on why it's the right thing. Fishback clearly failed to do the latter, especially as an ODA commander. Having your guys criticize you as both too timid and too aggressive isn't an indictment of their ability to think rationally, it's a sign you've lost their trust and confidence - The veteran mental health care system remains generally fucked, largely because the animating force behind the VA is CYA, not a bona fide desire to help patients. If their CYA interests converge with what you need, you'll get great care. If not, you can slip through the cracks, as Fishback did - On a related note, veterans can be a difficult bunch and VA mental health people are often overworked and cynical. In the case of someone like Fishback who was in crisis and probably not the easiest person to interact with, it is sad but not surprising that his care team was lackadaisical about following up and getting him the care he needed

metabagel 5y ago
- People who have found their "mission in life" often can be pretty abrasive about it, alienating friends and former colleagues -- especially when it's a "moral imperative" mission like ending detainee abuse -------------------- Let's call it "prisoner abuse", please. The word "detainee" should refer to someone who is in temporary custody.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- webmaven 5y ago
  > The word "detainee" should refer to someone who is in temporary custody. We need a new word for people held indefinitely (technically temporarily, but with practically infinite renewals of a 'limited' term by a compliant judiciary). There will be an expansion of the sort of exigent circumstances used as justification for such treatment. This seems like a recurring antipattern, as with IP maximalists pushing for 'forever minus a day'[0] copyright terms (which, thankfully, seems to have abated, with works now entering the public domain every year). [0] http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2009-December/094574.html http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2009-Decemb...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

fnord77 5y ago

Fuck NPR. They refused to call waterboarding “torture”

CosmicCarl 5y ago

How curious and convenient for the U.S. government that so many of these people who expose their government's espionage, sabotage, murder of women and children, crimes of war, just happen to end up in prison or die at an early age.

trinsic2 5y ago

Thanks for posting this. I want to remember there were people who tried to bring awareness to what we have become. 50 or 100 years from now, the next generation can look back on what happened and I hope they make different choices. IMHO this is a systemic problem with the evolution of our species.