Stressed Out and On Edge

“My experiences are not pornography for my friends or for anyone else. I use the word pornography because I feel like it is just the ... exploitation of my personal experiences for someone else's entertainment ... I dehumanized people ... I don't even know how many raids I did while I was there. But during raids you're throwing them up against the wall, you're tying their hands behind their back, you're dragging them out of the bed. You're dehumanizing them in front of their wives and their kids and, you know, the women are crying and the children are crying and you're just like, whatever. Put a bag over their head or blindfold, drag them into the Humvee. Certain exhibitions of violence on my part that were probably unnecessary — were definitely unnecessary. But I was really stressed out and on edge at the time and I conducted myself ... like that."

—Demond Mullins, a young man from Brooklyn who spent a year in Iraq with the National Guard and has found academics helpful in dealing with the effects of his experiences in the war (From Morning Edition, NPR, 11/14/07)

A Single, Readable Page

In the documentary No End in Sight, Robert Hutchings, the Chairman of the National Intelligence Council from 2003 to 2005 recalls that President Bush dismissed his agency's Report on the State of the Insurgency in Iraq as mere guesswork. "The President hadn't read it, not even the one-page summary over which we worked so hard to reduce these findings to a single, readable page."

• Reviews
• New York Times Op-Ed letter titled, "How I Didn't Dismantle Iraq's Army" written by L. Paul Bremer III.
• Director Charles Ferguson's rebuttal to Mr. Bremer's editorial

Iraq in Fragments

"Iraq in Fragments illuminates post-war Iraq in three acts, building a vivid picture of a country pulled in different directions by religion and ethnicity. Filmed in verité style, with no scripted narration, the film power fully explores the lives of ordinary Iraqis: people whose thoughts, beliefs, aspirations, and concerns are at once personal and illustrative of larger issues in Iraq today." (Typecast Pictures)

• "From 300 hours of material, Mr. Longley has created a collage of images, sounds and characters, an intimate, partial portrait of an unraveling nation -- a portrait that gains power partly by virtue of its incompleteness." A.O. Scott, The New York Times
• "Alone among the works I've seen and read about Iraq in the last three years, Iraq in Fragments captures the tremendous complexity and variability of the country, offering neither facile hope nor fashionable despair." Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com

Metacritic Reviews