An Inconvenient Captain

Army Captain Ian Fishback, of the 1st of the 504th, 82nd Airborne, has just become a very famous man. In an open letter to Senator John McCain (a man who knows a bit about prisoners of war, and abuse) the West Point graduate and veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan essentially accuses his chain-of-command with a failure to develop and disseminate a uniform code of conduct for detainee and prisoner handling. This failure, he submits, is what bears responsibility for the appalling incidents of prisoner abuse that have stained the national honor, and damaged the prospects of the military mission.

If true, this represents a grievous and frankly surprising failure of command, especially considering that we are four years into a global campaign against violent extremism that has a moral character at least as important as its military one.

There’s no doubting the personal bravery of Cpt Fishback’s actions – that is, at least, if he had any intention at all upon completing a military career. Don’t get me wrong: I firmly believe that there are ideas worth dying for, and ideals worth “dying” for. Cpt Fishback clearly believes the vacuum in guidance that he perceives falls into the latter category. Because its true that brave or not, such a letter published in such a forum, apart from its explicit content, is also a tacit professional suicide note: There are many ways to get the attention of one’s superiors – the open letter to a Senator published in the Washington Post, accusing dereliction of duty by everyone from his battalion commander to the secretary of defense, is the one calculated to do the most amount of damage en route.

It will be very interesting to see what result comes out of the senatorial inquisition that is no doubt on the way. I repeat that I would be very disappointed and surprised to find out that the guidance available to the captain and to his men was in some way insufficient. One of the things that disturbs me about his letter is the fact that he asked so many different people what they thought the rules were, as he puts it:

For 17 months, I tried to determine what specific standards governed the treatment of detainees by consulting my chain of command through battalion commander, multiple JAG lawyers, multiple Democrat and Republican Congressmen and their aides, the Ft. Bragg Inspector General’s office, multiple government reports, the Secretary of the Army and multiple general officers, a professional interrogator at Guantanamo Bay, the deputy head of the department at West Point responsible for teaching Just War Theory and Law of Land Warfare, and numerous peers who I regard as honorable and intelligent men.

For his sake, I hope the investigation will reveal that he started small and close, and dismayed by the insufficiency of information available to him, moved up and out in his search for a coherent policy. For his sake, I hope we will not find that he played a multi-layered game of stump-the-dummy by asking as many people as he could what they thought the rules were, and then highlighting the difference between what was said by, for example, his on-scene judge advocate general corps representatives, a professor in an academic environment back in West Point, and the candid musings of the Defense Secretary in a press conference.

For my own part, I’ve been in the service too long to be persuaded that everyone superior to me was gifted by their rank with greater moral clarity or insight. I’ve also been around long enough not to take at face value the popular perception that all generals are in some way corrupt, or that all junior personnel are inherently noble. There will be an investigation, of that we can be sure.

And then, we shall see.