The final, anguished years of a warrior-scholar who exposed torture by US troops
npr.org
npr.org
- 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
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Let's call it "prisoner abuse", please. 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-Decemb...
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.
A whislteblower has acted against 'the group'. Nobody will want to touch you anymore.
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.
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.
Well, part of this mythology is that the true individual often takes the less-traveled harder road.
The legal system is clearly not up to that task, and not only in USA.
So it's not a surprise to me that people who speak up against the military are shunned; not just by that group, but by society at large, which venerates the armed forces.
I do wonder why so many really want it to be an American thing.
It is not.
What achievements justify the crimes it commits? For how long can it claim youth as an excuse?
Ah, but the US also produces "The Bachelorette," and McDonald's, so it's really a wash.
Being a nation that acts on the world stage is a messy and fraught business.
In my view, when a organization has failed because of the people that run them are running them for the wrong reasons, then they only are able to do so by the people that support them. This systemic corruption is only a reflection of the society we create every day by or choices and actions. It will only stop when people change their life styles to be more supportive of others, and less about self-gratification.
In this context, that means treating whistleblowers, specifically, better.
Rumsfeld's story is symptomatic of how the US treats powerful people: once you arrive you will be among friends, your voice will be amplified by the press, with an infinitely wide safety net and no ability of any group to hold you accountable or even make a dent in your bottom line. For all of the hoo ha about American democracy, powerful individuals are sacrosanct and checks on power are devalued: in the courts, in government, in the workplace, and in culture.
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Seems to me that we both are rankly speculating outside the bounds of the given evidence, no?
I bitflipped OPs statement, with the idea that if the opposing rhetoric sounds equally appealing then there's a strong possibility that neither of them are nutritious. :)
Edit: clarification
In both cases the final statement is way too broad to be anything but a non-sequitur. A government intent on silencing whistleblowers is indeed a type of organization, but it does not follow that the behavior of all or even most organizations are beyond reproach.
Similarly, while Donald Rumsfeld played a role in the Bush administration, his role was one small part of our entire representative form of government.
To make the argument for either conclusion, there need to be more ideas connecting our final sentences to the ones that preceded them.
In both cases there are broad generalizations being made, but in my version I was careful to circle back to the smaller theme. I try to do this consistently because avoiding "generic tangents" is in the HN guidelines:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
In retrospect, rather than relying on context, I could have explicitly qualified the final sentence to clarify that I was speaking of the relative weight of individuals and organizations in US society specifically with regards to the outcome of whistleblowing. I'd like to think there's something I could have done to have earned a more generous reading from you so we don't end up in a rhetorical gotcha game.
In any meritocratic society, the political careers of the people responsible would have been over, and a few of them should have at least stood trial for crimes against peace. Even if they were ultimately found not guilty, this is the kind of sword of Damocles that whistleblowers tend to face.
Instead, the only person of import whose career was truly destroyed was Collin Powell.
The messenger will be shot.
There's a Russian photo-blogger I read a bunch of posts by years ago, and he pointed out something about us that I hadn't fully appreciated before: we post notices everywhere. Simple statements and whole pages of legalese junk. All over the place. You can't un-see it once it's pointed out. The Land of the Free was one of only two countries (he'd been damn near everywhere) that he noted as having this behavior of posting signs everywhere telling you what you couldn't do. The other was Australia, which he found to be the only place much like the US in a lot of other ways, too.
Of course, we do it because lawyers say we need to, so if someone does something stupid and gets hurt we can say we "told" them not to, so they'll lose if they sue us. Or so if we decide we want someone gone we can point to a posted rule as the reason even if that's not actually why (and of course posting a rule somehow gives it magic power, versus just deciding on it). Blame dispersal/deflection.
We're also big on tying up responsibility, punishment, and blame all together, in ways that I suspect are pretty damn harmful overall, including economically. Leads to a pretty gross culture of dishonesty, for obvious reasons.
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-mil... [2]: https://archive.org/details/War_Is_A_Racket
Not trending. It's always been this way. And not limited to military. Plenty of examples when human live was ruined without any recourse.
Something to think about before you tell your local politicians you support armed conflict. Abstinence works well in this situation.
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".
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?
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.
I swear something broke inside of me after reading some of the details - ever since, I don't even watch/read news anymore, because it just makes me so angry and sad. The Americans are supposed to be "the good guys", but agents of the state have performed atrocities on a bewildering scale for decades, and there is absolutely nothing any of us can do about it.
Since 9/11 the USA has been a rouge state, slaughtering hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions) of people all over the world. It is very hard to figure out the motivation, it is more than money. I am no historian but it seems like the sort of imperialism we have not seen for over a thousand years.
It is urgent that USA citizens reign in their government that is causing so much misery for so many so widely
There is no "good guys", this is pure propaganda, same shit for every other country. It's all about ressources and power, not good and evil. I mean, Guantanamo, "the good guys", yeah, good joke...
So unless you tought up a scheme in which not torturing foreigners might be profitable for the rich Americans, the information you have has no influence on the future.
In addition there have been public threats against the judges.