"Officer's Road Led Him Outside Army"

[_ed_]

This is inspiring. I saw CPT Fishback on the news this morning, and I actually think I remember him. (I also went to West Point, and I think I was a year ahead of him). Quite a brave man.

Capt. Ian Fishback repeatedly voiced his concern about prisoner abuse in Iraq to his superiors, but felt he was being brushed off.

By Richard A. Serrano, Times Staff Writer


WASHINGTON — When Army Capt. Ian Fishback told his company and battalion commanders that soldiers were abusing Iraqi prisoners in violation of the Geneva Convention, he says, they told him those rules were easily skirted.

When he wrote a memo saying Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was wrong in telling Congress that the Army follows the Geneva dictates, his lieutenant colonel responded only: "I am aware of Fishback's concerns."

And when Fishback found himself in the same room as Secretary of the Army Francis J. Harvey at Ft. Benning, Ga., he again complained about prisoner abuse. He said Harvey told him that "corrective action was already taken."

At every turn, it seemed, the decorated young West Point graduate, the son of a Vietnam War veteran from Michigan's Upper Peninsula, whose wife is serving with the Army in Iraq, felt that the military had shut him out.

So he turned to those he knows best. He sought guidance from fellow infantry commanders and his West Point classmates, and learned that they agreed with him that abuse of prisoners was widespread and that officers weren't adequately trained in how to handle them.

Then, in a lengthy chronology obtained Saturday by The Times, recounting what he saw in Iraq and his numerous efforts to get the Army's attention, he wrote that "Harvey is wrong." He wrote that Army guidance was "too vague for officers to enforce American values." He concluded that violations of the Geneva Convention were "systematic, and the Army is misleading America."

This summer, after weighing the possible effects on his career, he stepped outside the Army's chain of command and telephoned the Human Rights Watch advocacy group. He later met with aides on the Senate Armed Services Committee. On Friday, he authorized them to make public his allegations, along with those of two sergeants, of widespread prisoner abuse they had witnessed when they served in Iraq in 2003 and 2004 as members of the Army's 82nd Airborne Division.

Within hours, the Army announced it had opened a criminal investigation.

The review is the first major investigation by the military of widespread prisoner abuse outside the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, and the first time such a review has targeted soldiers in the regular Army rather than the National Guardsmen and reservists in the Abu Ghraib case.

But for Fishback, whom friends describe as a deeply religious Christian and patriot who prays before each meal and can quote from the Constitution, the ordeal may be just beginning.

Army officials have temporarily furloughed him from Special Operations training school at Ft. Bragg, N.C., to make him available to the Criminal Investigation Command as it sorts through his allegations.

And sources close to the case said investigators are pressing him to identify the two sergeants who have backed up his accusations — something he does not want to do for the sake of all their careers.

----------------------
See the rest here: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-abuse25sep25,0,4578648.story?coll=la-home-world

[MADem]

1. He stayed awake for the ethics lectures

Pity the top brass and the civilian leadership didn't do the same...

[Dhalgren]

2. We need to keep a close eye on what happens to

Capt. Fishback. This man is a real patriot and a good citizen who is trying to do the right thing in a terrible situation. I wish that the military was filled with men and women like Capt. Fishback, we need more of them. Watch for how the Army and the Fascist Republican Party members treat this hero; we have to have his back...

[gulfcoastliberal]

3. The Army is probbly investigating the easiest way to get rid of him

That's where their criminal probe is going.

[pacalo]

4. I saw his interview on, I think, "60 Minutes" last Sunday.

I was deeply impressed with him: West Point graduate who had the integrity & courage to speak out about these war crimes.

I was wondering if he had a lot to do with Lindsey Graham's newfound sense of morality when he spoke out against the torture during the armed service committee hearings.