The screenshot taken from The New York Times Magazine's website shows the title and picture of its recent report about Ian Fishback, a graduate of a Michigan doctoral program and among the most prominent veterans of the U.S. war in Iraq. (Xinhua)
His allegations, confirmed by other paratroopers, shattered the Pentagon's insistence that the sadism and brutalities at Abu Ghraib prison were isolated crimes and revealed systemic military failures to set humane standards for prisoner treatment.
NEW YORK, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Ian Fishback, a recent graduate of a Michigan doctoral program and among the most prominent veterans of the U.S. war in Iraq, allowed the police officer to slip handcuffs around his wrists on Sept. 10, 2021, on the University of Michigan's main campus in Ann Arbor, Michigan, after a judge updated a court order giving police officers the authority to return him involuntarily to psychiatric care.
He had been roaming campus intermittently for a week, shouting profanities at bystanders, creating a disturbance at the Wolverines' opening football game, insulting police officers and raging about the U.S. Army and the CIA. He was already known to the university's public-safety department, which had investigated complaints about him since at least 2019, according to The New York Times Magazine on Tuesday.
Fishback once seemed a gentlemanly embodiment of martial ideals. Intellectually driven, impressively fit, a West Point graduate and Arabist with one combat tour to Afghanistan and three to Iraq, he was heralded as morally inquisitive and ethically rigorous, qualities that earned him international praise after he went public with accounts that fellow paratroopers had humiliated, beat and tortured Iraqi men in 2003.
"His allegations, confirmed by other paratroopers, shattered the Pentagon's insistence that the sadism and brutalities at Abu Ghraib prison were isolated crimes and revealed systemic military failures to set humane standards for prisoner treatment," said the magazine. His message was so resonant that it swiftly spurred Congress to action, leading to a new federal law intended to protect anyone in American custody from the sorts of abuses that Fishback insisted were widespread.
Two tours in the Special Forces followed, then a promotion to major. After earning a pair of master's degrees, he transferred to West Point in 2012 to teach courses about war and morality to cadets, before resigning his commission in 2015 for a career as a philosopher. "Hard-working scholar, sought-after public speaker, Fishback was a one-man brand - a soldier-turned-public-intellectual willing to expose the dark underside of American power," said the report.
Gloom dimmed the glow. For at least five years and mostly out of public view, Fishback struggled with a mercilessly advancing mental illness, never consistently diagnosed, that scrambled his sense of reality and altered his behavior. Now the police characterized him in three words: "Potentially Violent Person." "The agonizing spiral of a formerly celebrated soldier entered its final phase," added the report. ■
