Ian: as I was getting ready to leave for that phase of my training which is supposed to take about a month and I was supposed to be ex- communicado, I wasn't supposed to be able to talk to anyone, my fellow student who was the acting team sergeant, I was acting team leader of this training detachment, my team sergeant called me and said, 'I don't know what's going on, but the non -commissioned officer trainer in charge of us said that you're for sure not going to make it through.' He said, 'I don't think that's appropriate and I don't know what's going on, but I thought you should know and I wanted to warn you.' That was related to what was going on with my interactions with the Congress people.

Barry: was this a threat? Or was it just a prediction? Ian told some people about it in Congress that he was in contact with. That same day, his letter to McCain gets leaked to the media.

Ian: and it's plausible that the release of my story to the media was to protect me in some way. That's my best explanation. Honestly, I don't know what exactly happened.

Barry: after Ian's letter was leaked to the press, things move quickly. He becomes a national story. John McCain adds an amendment to a defense spending bill in December, 2005, outlawing cruel, inhumane and humiliating treatment of US-held detainees. He cites Captain Ian Fishback on the Senate floor. The amendment passes ninety to nine in the Senate. Ian is named as one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people of 2005. He finishes Special Forces training and served two more combat tours in Iraq, more on that later. I asked Ian about the fallout for him inside of the army.

Ian: there are a lot of folks who disagreed with what I did and I don't think they understood why I did it, for one thing. But regardless, they really disapproved of it and they wanted me out of Special Forces, maybe out of the army; they wanted me to be punished. It wasn't everyone, but it was enough people that everywhere I went, I would encounter it and when I encountered it, it was almost impossible to reverse. So imagine that you have ten people working with you. You're expected to be the leader and two of them are deadset at undermining everything you do. It's just so frustrating and at the beginning, I managed it okay, I probably could have managed it better, but over time, those repeated interactions made it harder and harder for me to function in the organization and honestly, I think they had a negative effect on me as a person just because I became very, very mistrustful of people around me and it was warranted. But, it still wasn't the type of person I wanted to be.

Barry: it's been ten years now since all of this happened to Ian. I asked him to reflect as a philosopher on what he thought about the whole affair; why he thought the Bush administration and the senior military command acted the way they did.

Ian: one thing is they wanted to punish someone; I think that's true. But I also think they thought that it would work. I think it was just desperation. One thing that's really amazing to me is among military commanders, if a commander is faced with a dangerous and stressful situation, and the commander just spazzes out, that's bad. But amongst our politicians, we almost expect them to do it. So, if a politician gets up after 9/11 and says, 'everyone calm down, here's what we need to do,' that might be rece ived well, but when Bush, which basically what he did was overreact and just start reaching for whatever's available, rather than making a systematic, informed decision about what might be a good decision, people tend to be very forgiving about that. It's really bizarre to me. When we think about what it means to be a military professional and we look at the torture policy that was carried out after September 11th,