The anti-torture whistleblower during the U.S. occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq was laid to rest Tuesday with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery.
Fishback, 42, died of cardiac arrest nearly two years ago while in court-mandated mental health care in Michigan.
"Fishback was a dissident-in-uniform who ultimately set aside a sparkling military career to become a philosopher before entering a dizzying mental health spiral," says The New York Times.
The presiding Army chaplain, Maj. Joanna Forbes, highlighted the manner in which Fishback applied the values he embraced as a West Point graduate and as a military officer to protect those who ended up in the Army’s battlefield grasp.
“Ian fought with honor, integrity and courage for his nation and his fellow soldiers, too,” said Forbes. “And with those same values he also stood up for some viewed only as enemies but, he knew, were people who had the right to just treatment and dignity. I have buried many heroes. But none like Ian Fishback.”
Marc Garlasco, a former Human Rights Watch investigator who helped bring the abuses to light, said Fishback ranked among the most courageous veterans of the United States’ long and ultimately failed occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq — a young officer who put moral duties and his oath to the Constitution above other concerns.
“Ian’s strong moral courage was all he had after his chain of command told him to stay quiet,” Garlasco said. “Ian was the only one to stand up and say, ‘No, America shouldn’t torture people.’”
In 2006, Fishback was recognized as one of Time magazine’s 100 influential people of the year. But after two deployments to Iraq with the Special Forces, he told family and friends he felt shunned and sometimes threatened by some soldiers, commanders and peers, who treated him as a turncoat.
Fishback pursued a new career in academics, first as a philosophy instructor at West Point and later, after departing the Army at the rank of major, as a doctoral student at the University of Michigan. There he studied just-war theory, a genre of philosophy that examines the behavior of combatants. But he didn't rebound from the painful isolation of whistle-blowing, an experience his family says compounded an escalating mental illness, never firmly diagnosed, and that plunged him into periods of paranoia and delusion.
His treatment, beginning soon after the University of Michigan awarded him a doctorate in 2021, pushed Fishback into the news late that year. This time he was a profile of tragedy — the fatal casualty of what his family and supporters described as a seemingly unresponsive VA, which denied him care as he was shuffled through civilian hospitals and group homes, growing ever more confused and frail while receiving antipsychotic medication against his will, according to medical records.
The details of his involuntary care and apparent state and federal inaction during what became an enfeeblement so profound that it turned lethal are under review by the state of Michigan and the inspector general of the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Early this year, after The New York Times Magazine published an investigation into Fishback’s decline and death, Denis McDonough, the VA secretary, conceded in a speech to the American Legion that the department had “failed” to fulfill its responsibilities to the former officer. “We all have to be there for veterans when it matters most, especially in times of crisis,” McDonough said. “We didn’t carefully coordinate our response to his needs across federal, state and county systems.”