Former Army Maj. Ian Fishback, a U.S. Military Academy graduate and combat veteran whose condemnation of torture by U.S. soldiers in Iraq produced groundbreaking legislation in the early years of that war, died Nov. 19 at an adult foster-care facility in Bangor, Mich. He was 42.
His father, John Fishback, said the cause had not been determined but that Maj. Fishback, who served in the military until 2015, had been racked by paranoid and delusional thoughts for months. He speculated that his son’s experiences in combat may have caused a neurological degeneration that contributed to his erratic behavior.
During his years in the military and long after, Maj. Fishback developed a reputation for uncompromising moral courage. Upon returning in 2005 from a tour in Iraq with the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, he wrote a letter decrying the abuse of Iraqi detainees by his unit. He sent it that September to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who had endured more than five years of imprisonment and torture by the North Vietnamese as a young naval officer, and to Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Maj. Fishback said vague, contradictory and inconsistent guidance from Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and senior military leaders had led to a “wide range of abuses” by U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, including “death threats, beatings, broken bones, murder, exposure to elements, extreme forced physical exertion, hostage-taking, stripping,...
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