WASHINGTON (AFP) — Five years after President George W. Bush stood on a warship deck in front of a banner reading "Mission Accomplished," the Iraq war has again thrust to the forefront of the US presidential campaign.

A new Democratic Party ad highlighting Republican candidate John McCain's suggestion that US troops should be in Iraq for 100 years is a bitter reminder that the war is anything but over, despite Bush's 2003 declaration of an end to major combat operations.

The 30-second video irked Republicans who scrambled to ask television networks not to broadcast it. The clip, available on the Internet, had some 200,000 hits on Wednesday on YouTube.

Republican National Committee chairman Robert Duncan desperately appealed to television networks sense of what he called responsibility by opting not to air the tape.

"I hope the cable networks will see it as their responsibility to pull the DNC's blatantly false attack ad against Senator John McCain," Duncan said referring to the Democratic National Committee.

The clip starts with an exchange between an unidentified man and McCain at a meeting in January.

"President Bush has talked about our staying in Iraq for 50 years," the man is heard to say to Mccain on the tape. "Maybe 100. That would be fine with me," the Republican White House hopeful is heard to say.

The video then goes on to show images of violence in Iraq including some from Michael Moore's anti-war film "Fahrenheit 9/11."

Superimposed on the screen are "Five Years," "500 million dollars," "More than 4,000 dead" referring to US fatalities.

The Iraq war is highly unpopular in the United States, and polls show, linked to the Republicans. It was five years ago Thursday that Bush made his appearance on the USS Abraham Lincoln and announced, "major combat operations in Iraq have ended."

Five years on, some 150,000 US troops are still in combat in Iraq, with no clear idea when a pullout might come.

And conditions are increasingly rough: 49 US troops were killed in Iraq in April making it the bloodiest month since September 2007.

McCain is the only US presidential candidate solidly backing the war in Iraq. His Democratic rivals Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have both argued for a prompt withdrawal of US troops.

Republicans charge that McCain has been taken out of context. While not denying that McCain had raised the possibility US troops could remain in Iraq for a century, Republicans stress that their candidate never was speaking about a 100-year war but rather of a US military presence akin to the one in Japan, Europe and South Korea after earlier wars.

Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean insisted that McCain's remarks were not taken out of context.

"Now, does anyone think that if you keep our troops in Iraq for a hundred years, people won't be attacking them and won't be setting off suicide bombs and won't be having militias go after them? I don't think so," Dean asked on NBC television.

"Most Americans don't think so. What Senator McCain is saying doesn't make any sense. We cannot be in Iraq for a hundred years," Dean added.

And the controversy did not look likely to wane.

Left-leaning activists MoveOn.org said they were going to launch a television campaign focused on the ides of the United States spending 100 years in Iraq.

In a voiceover, the MoveOn spot airs McCain saying: "I don't think Americans are concerned if we're there for 100 years or 1,000 years or 10,000 years."

Then the announcer's voice chimes in: "100 years in Iraq? And you thought no one could be worse than George Bush."

1 Million New Voters For Last 7 Primaries

By Eli Saslow / Washington Post

RALEIGH, N.C. -- They lined up shoulder to shoulder inside the gray high-rise downtown, their politics as diverse as their backgrounds. An ex-felon who needs health insurance, followed by a high school student seeking empowerment, followed by a Marine Corps veteran who wants to prevent his country from crumbling.

Like hundreds of others, their quests led them to the Wake County voter services office this month to register as Democrats for the first time. The line of newcomers that snaked across the checkered tile floor was emblematic of those that have formed across the country this year: black voters, young voters, lifelong Republicans switching parties -- all registering in record numbers, and all aligning as Democrats.

Elections Director Cherie Poucher waited for them behind a counter with a jar of pens and a 10-inch stack of registration forms. She had hired 10 people from a temp agency to help handle the rush on this final day of North Carolina voter registration. Now, as she watched four more people file through the door, Poucher wished she had hired more.

"In 20 years," she said, "I've never seen anything quite like it."

The past seven states to hold primaries registered more than 1 million new Democratic voters; Republican numbers mainly ebbed or stagnated. North Carolina and Indiana, which will hold their presidential primaries on May 6, are reporting a swell of new Democrats that triples the surge in registrations before the 2004 primary.

The contest between Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama has engaged enough new voters to change the political makeup of the country, experts say. The next several months -- and the general election in November -- will reveal the extent of the shift. Is it a temporary increase in interest resulting from a close election between historic candidates? Or is it a seismic swing in party realignment that foretells the end of the red-blue stalemate?

"We are likely to set an all-time record for primary turnout," said Curtis Gans, director of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate. "Whether this makes a major historical impact depends on who these voters are and whether or not they get what they want."

'I Want to Vote'

Jason Robertson, 29, walked through the voter services door a few minutes after 2 p.m., wearing a stained, long-sleeve T-shirt and a black winter cap. He had extended his lunch break to come here, and he needed to be back at work in an hour. He makes brochures in a small printing shop in a warehouse off the highway. It's a good job, and he intends to keep it.

Work had become hard to find after he picked up a felony drug charge five years ago. His cousin found him the gig at the printing shop, but it can offer him only 30 hours of work each week. Robertson dreams of opening his own shop, or applying for one of those cushy jobs printing for the state. "It's crazy," he said. "They're paying, like, $15 an hour."

Robertson always thought the felony charge disqualified him from voting, until his girlfriend picked up a registration form last month at a hair salon and read the fine print (ex-felons may vote in North Carolina if they complete all terms of their sentence, such as probation or parole). She brought it home to the two-bedroom apartment they share with their four children and told him to fill it out.

"You're always talking about wanting change," Kim Fowler told him. "Now you can help make it."

Fowler, a longtime voter, met Robertson at a post office four years ago, and her interest in politics rubbed off on him. She took him to see "Fahrenheit 9/11," and volunteered at Obama's local office. More cynical than hopeful, Robertson wasn't the volunteering type. "George Bush cheated in both elections, and Congress should all be thrown out," he said. But lately he felt compelled by a new sense of political urgency.

"Damn it, man. I want to vote," he said. "There's no money, no jobs, and I want to feel like my vote is counting for something.

"I want them to answer me, 'What happened to the middle class?' You got rich, you got poor, and everybody is going in one of those directions."

Lately, Robertson has been sliding ever closer to broke. Since he moved in with Fowler, he has supported a household of six, including his 2-year-old son; Fowler's 10- and 8-year-old daughters from a previous relationship; and a baby they share. A few months ago, Robertson paid $632 -- a solid two weeks' wages -- to have the baby circumcised.

Medical bills have devastated their bank account, because Robertson and Fowler lack health insurance. Last year, Robertson's hand was caught in machinery at work, slicing his right index finger to the bone. His trip to the emergency room resulted in nine stitches, and he has been paying for them ever since. Three hundred dollars for anesthesia. Nine hundred for an X-ray. Six hundred for stitches.

Robertson considered asking his boss for help with the medical bills, but the company doesn't offer insurance, and he needs the job.

That is why, on the day he registered to vote, Robertson dropped off the form Fowler had given him a few days earlier and turned right back around, headed for work.

Her Dream, Too

Kyla White, 18, had planned to go straight to the voting office after seventh period at Enloe High School, but now she wondered if she would ever make it there. With 10 minutes left before the final bell, her teacher had just locked the door and called a Code Red, signaling imminent danger on school grounds. As instructed, White moved away from the window, hunched under her desk and tucked her head to her knees.

For 15 minutes, she listened for gunshots.

It turned out to be a false alarm caused by a suspended student on school grounds -- just like the Code Yellow earlier in the afternoon and the morning bomb scare that forced all 2,400 students to evacuate to the football field. At the end of the school day, as White walked to her 1997 Honda with classmate Janay Lovelace, the two friends agreed: They would still drive downtown to register.

"We've got to," White said. "Life just isn't supposed to be like this."

As a senior in high school, White spent most of her time waiting on forces beyond her control. College applications, curfews, Code Reds -- she had no choice but to wait them out and hope for the best. On her Facebook profile page, she displayed a countdown to the landmarks of empowerment. Graduation: 63 days. Move in at North Carolina State: 126 days.

Voting: 25 days.

Her parents, postal service employees who met at North Carolina State, have voted in every presidential election since they turned 18. They encouraged Kyla to register.

She would cast her ballot, she told them -- but on her own terms. She wanted to vote for a multiracial America, one in which peers wouldn't call her "too white" for being one of a handful of black students in the Enloe honors program. She wanted to vote for no more Code Reds. She wanted to vote for lower gas prices.

She wanted to vote for Obama.

Her gas tank was near empty when White turned the ignition of her car to drive to voter services on that Friday afternoon. She spends almost $40 a week on gas, and she makes only about $120 each week working part time as a receptionist at Sports Clips. To afford driving, she started to skimp on meals out with friends. Snoopy's sold 99-cent hotdogs on Tuesdays. The nearby Mexican buffet cost only $3.99 at lunch.

Luckily, the drive to voter services was just 1.6 miles -- probably about $1 round trip, White guessed.

"I want the American dream of having a better life than your parents," she said, "and days like this just don't seem very dreamy."

'Not Going to Sit at Home'

Al Landsberg, 66, approached the counter of the voter registration office at 4 p.m., an hour before deadline. Hefty, with a hint of sweat on his white mustache, he looked as drained as the employees behind the counter who rested their heads in their hands. Voting exhausted him. Ever since he cast a ballot for Ronald Reagan, Landsberg has always felt as though he was trying to choose the lesser of two evils.

For this election, though, he decided he had no choice but to vote. A lifelong Republican, he planned to switch his party affiliation so he could vote in the Democratic primary. That Hillary Clinton wasn't great, he said, but she was just as good as presumptive GOP nominee John McCain and a heck of a lot better than that other guy, "you know, uh, Embowa. He'd take this country right down the tubes."

Landsberg's wife, Evelyn, collects porcelain dolls, and her co-collectors send the Landsbergs frequent political e-mails, most of them critical of Obama. "From what I can tell, if he becomes president he will refuse to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance and we will leave Iraq unprepared," Landsberg said. "I'm not going to sit at home and let that happen."

He needed something to do, anyway. He recently retired after five-plus years in the Marine Corps and 40 years in the printing business, and Evelyn still works at an electrical supplier. Their three children moved out long ago. The Landsbergs save what extra money they have for three or four annual trips to Las Vegas, where they can find a cheap hotel room, play the dollar slots and smoke -- indoors and in peace.

They never travel outside the United States, save the occasional Caribbean cruise. "Anything you want to see, you can see it right here," Evelyn said. Plus, they prefer to spend their tourist money at home, just as they buy only American-made cars. Not enough people look out for America these days, Landsberg said.

Like McCain, with his free-and-easy stance on immigration, which seems almost identical to Clinton's. Landsberg's father had come from Germany, first jumping ship illegally and then, after a few years and some English classes, through Ellis Island. He met Landsberg's mother during the legal immigration process.

"Anybody who came here illegally should have to leave, and I mean now," Landsberg said. "If McCain's not offering me that, I don't really see what he's offering. A vote for Clinton at least means you vote against Embowa, instead of voting for McCain, which is a vote against nobody."

He dropped his form over the counter and watched it disappear into the stack.

16-Hour Days

At 5 p.m., Poucher locked the front door at voter services and stared at the mound of registration forms piled behind the counter. Wake County had received at least 16,000 forms in the past week, and hundreds more would arrive by mail. At about three minutes per form, Poucher's office had just inherited more than 800 hours of work.

Poucher, 60, planned to work 16-hour days for the next week -- a schedule made complicated because the busiest election of her life had collided with one of her life's craziest times. Her husband died two years ago, leaving her to raise three grandchildren on her own. On Friday, she rushed home from the office at 6 p.m., dismissed the daytime nanny, fed her two dogs, readied her 11-year-old grandson for hockey practice and doled out vitamins for her twin 9-year-old grandsons.

While her night-shift nanny helped put the twins to bed, Poucher retreated upstairs to her laptop. She wanted to input data for at least 150 new voters by the end of the night.

It was pretty mindless work, really, and her fingers danced while her mind wandered. She thought about her husband, his ashes in an urn on the shelf above her. She thought about 1972, when she ran for local office in Chicago and learned the devastating power of each individual ballot. She lost by 12 votes.

Mostly, she thought about the names on the screen in front of her. Who were they? What did they look like? Whom would they vote for? Each form held its own mystery, a new character to ponder in the electoral drama to come.

By Jason Kelly / Bloomberg

April 23 -- It's been a rough few months for David Rubenstein, co-founder and managing director of Carlyle Group.

As the subprime crisis sent dealmaking into a tailspin last August, Carlyle barely saved its buyout of Home Depot Inc.'s contractor supply unit. When banks balked at lending, Carlyle increased the amount of cash it put in and got Home Depot to slash the price 18 percent to $8.5 billion.

In December, unions petitioned regulators to block Carlyle's $6.3 billion purchase of nursing home chain Manor Care Inc., accusing the firm of focusing on profits to the detriment of patients. Though their effort was unsuccessful, the unions continued to hound Rubenstein, demonstrating in January at the University of Pennsylvania, where he gave a speech at a private equity conference held at the Wharton School.

``For the next year or so, we will be in purgatory,'' Rubenstein told the conference. ``We will have to atone for our sins a little bit.''

A few weeks later, Carlyle's mortgage bond fund paid for the transgression of overleveraging. Carlyle Capital Corp. defaulted on $16.6 billion of debt, after borrowing 32 times its $670 million of equity capital nine months earlier to invest mainly in AAA-rated mortgage securities.

Carlyle, which has 60 funds owning $81.1 billion in assets, can withstand the $150 million loss from the Carlyle Capital failure. More severe was the damage to its reputation for giving investors stellar returns -- an average of more than 30 percent annually since its founding in 1987, according to the company.

`They Tripped'

``They tripped, and they tripped in public,'' says Paul Schaye, managing director of New York-based Chestnut Hill Partners LLC, which helps private equity firms find investments. ``That hurts the brand.''

Carlyle's woes reflect those of the whole private equity industry. After low interest rates and a booming stock market fueled record deal volume in 2006 and '07, the pace of buyouts has screeched to a halt. The subprime crisis, rising interest rates and a shrinking appetite for stock offerings have choked off the industry's main sources of profit.

As banks balked at extending credit, announced buyouts globally plummeted 63 percent in the second half of 2007 to $200.8 billion from $542.0 billion in the first half, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Model `Is Broken'

``You don't see the banks interested in getting into the syndicates,'' says Susanne Forsingdal, a partner at Copenhagen- based ATP Private Equity Partners, which manages about 3 billion euros ($4.75 billion). ``That model is broken.''

The slump worsened in the first quarter, when $60.7 billion of deals were announced globally -- down 70 percent from $200 billion a year earlier. Carlyle's total plummeted to just $568.6 million in the first quarter, an 86 percent drop from $4 billion a year earlier.

``The Greek gods reminded us that Golden Ages end, and not always happily,'' Rubenstein, a slender 58-year-old with silver hair and glasses, said in a talk at a private-equity conference in December in Dubai, where Carlyle set up an office in 2007.

Buyout firms are also finding that the traditional exits for their investments -- stock offerings -- have slammed shut. In the first quarter of 2008, initial public offerings and stock sales fell 38 percent to $73.3 billion, according to Bloomberg data.

While private equity investors typically have a time horizon of as much as seven years before they reap their profits, they may have to wait even longer, says Forsingdal, whose firm doesn't have any money in Carlyle funds.

Slower Returns

``In some cases, funds are saying it will take a year longer than they were expecting to sell an investment,'' she says. ``They're not in a position to make the very fast returns we've seen in the past couple of years.''

Carlyle is counting on its head start in international markets to help it weather the turbulence in private equity. Rubenstein predicts that within five years, about two-thirds of the firm's investments will be in non-U.S. companies. Currently, 64 percent is in North America, 26 percent in Europe, and 10 percent in Asia.

Rubenstein, whom Colin Blaydon, director of Dartmouth College's Tuck Center for Private Equity and Entrepreneurship, calls ``the secretary of state of private equity,'' spends 250- 270 days traveling from Carlyle's Washington headquarters each year, according to a company official.

Abu Dhabi Buys Stake

Carlyle itself has been hit by the markets' edginess. Last year, it postponed plans to sell shares in itself via an IPO. Instead, the firm worked its long-standing connections in the Middle East: Mubadala Development Co., an arm of the Abu Dhabi government, bought 7.5 percent of Carlyle for $1.35 billion in September, valuing Carlyle at about $20 billion.

That made it the buyout firm's second-largest owner, behind the founders, who refuse to disclose their stakes, and ahead of the California Public Employees' Retirement System, or Calpers, which owns 5 percent.

Mubadala is just one of the sovereign wealth funds -- government-owned pools of capital -- that have bought into private equity firms recently. In May 2007, China Investment Corp. bought a 9 percent stake in Blackstone Group LP, the private equity firm that manages more than $100 billion in buyout, real estate and hedge fund assets. Blackstone closed yesterday at $18.62, 40 percent below its $31 offering price last June 21.

Last July, Apollo Management LP sold a $1.2 billion stake to the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and Calpers. It also sold an undisclosed amount of shares through a private exchange run by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. In April, New York-based Apollo said it would apply to list those shares on the New York Stock Exchange.

Higher Taxes Loom

More trouble could be brewing for private equity if a Democrat wins the U.S. presidential election. Candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have both said they favor treating carried interest, the profits private equity partners take when they sell an investment, as ordinary income rather than capital gains. That means it would be taxed at a 35 percent rate rather than 15 percent.

Private equity companies hold enormous sway over the economy. Carlyle says companies it has investments in employ more than 286,000 workers and have combined annual revenue of $87 billion, more than Microsoft Corp. or Procter and Gamble Co.

``It's a giant institution,'' Rick Rickertsen, managing partner of Washington-based Pine Creek Partners, says of rival private equity firm Carlyle. ``They've built Goldman Sachs in 20 years.'' (The Wall Street powerhouse was founded in 1869.)

Andy Stern, the Washington-based president of the Service Employees International Union, which opposed Carlyle's takeover of Manor Care, says, ``We're seeing companies more than countries making the rules of global economy.''

More Transparency

Rubenstein says the backlash by unions and politicians means private equity firms have to be more open. ``We have to be more forthcoming about how private equity works, who our investors are, how we add value,'' he says. Not that forthcoming: Carlyle declines to disclose the names of investors in its funds or to give returns on individual funds.

To continue attracting investors, Carlyle needs new markets. Last year, Carlyle began raising a $750 million Middle East fund -- its first -- that aims at taking stakes in local family-owned companies or doing buyouts.

``We were early in Europe, early in Asia and hopefully early here,'' Rubenstein said in an interview in December in Dubai. ``Now we have to prove we can do the deals.'' So far, Carlyle hasn't announced any.

Osama bin Laden

In 1997, Carlyle became the first U.S. private equity firm to set up in Europe. The firm bought Andritz AG, an Austrian machine maker, in 1999, and more than doubled its investment of 48 million euros when it sold its stake four years later.

The Middle East is where Carlyle got some of its first investors, including the Saudi royal family and owners of the Saudi Binladin Group, the Jeddah-based construction company founded by Osama bin Laden's father, Mohammed. Carlyle returned the bin Laden family's money after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Now, with oil trading at about $100 a barrel and Dubai trying to transform itself into a tourism and financial hub for the region, Rubenstein is hoping to evolve from a fly-in fundraiser to an on-the-ground investor.

In November 2006, Rubenstein hired Paul Bagatelas, 45, formerly a director at Credit Suisse Group in Dubai, as a managing director to run the Dubai office, adding to regional outposts in Cairo and Istanbul. The same month, Rubenstein tapped Beirut-based Walid Musallam, formerly chief executive officer of Abu Dhabi Investment Co., the state-owned fund created in 1977, to head the Middle East and North Africa fund.

Seeking Deals in Dubai

Carlyle's 10 Dubai employees include Jordanian Firas Nasir, 38, a former mergers and acquisitions banker at UBS AG in San Francisco. Nasir is scouting for transactions in countries such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

He's based in offices on the seventh floor of a building in the Dubai International Financial Centre complex, which Dubai created to cater to foreign firms. Investment banks including Citigroup Inc. and Credit Suisse are neighbors.

``Private equity in this part of the world is a book that's being written right now,'' says Gary Long, chief operating officer of Investcorp Bank BSC, a Bahrain-based private equity firm. ``Success is going to be all about contacts and whether they trust you.''

Investcorp has historically invested Middle Eastern money outside the region in deals such as the buyout of Gucci Group NV and Tiffany and Co. Last year, it started a $1 billion fund to invest in Gulf companies.

Woody Allen's Rule

Rubenstein agrees that contacts lead to deals. ``Woody Allen said that 80 percent of success is showing up,'' he says in an interview in his Washington office. ``The fact that I'm showing up and showing my respect may make it easier to do business.''

One recent stop for Rubenstein's Gulfstream jet was Abu Dhabi, where he met with executives of Mubadala, including Waleed al-Muhairi, the fund's dishdasha-clad chief operating officer. ``This part of the world has been developing extremely rapidly,'' al-Muhairi said in a December interview in his Abu Dhabi office. ``They've taken notice of that.''

Earlier that same week, al-Muhairi and his staff had hosted a dinner for Rubenstein and other Carlyle executives at a Lebanese restaurant in the Emirates Palace Hotel, overlooking the deep blue waters of the Persian Gulf. They talked about U.S. credit markets and potential deals, says William Conway, a co- founder of Carlyle who attended the dinner. ``There are a few of them that are deal junkies,'' he says of the Mubadala executives.

`Hair on These Deals'

Abu Dhabi first began investing with Carlyle as a limited partner in various funds in the 1990s. Mubadala plans to invest a further $500 million in the region with Carlyle, the firm said in September. The companies are looking for investments in the energy, aerospace and construction and real estate sectors, al- Muhairi says.

Even when they find a transaction, completing it will take time. ``There will be hair on these deals,'' predicts Peter Baumbusch, a partner with the law firm of Gibson Dunn and Crutcher LLP in Dubai. ``It won't be the simple deals that happen in the U.S.''

Compared with the U.S., the Middle Eastern market is tiny. Last year, $12 billion of deals were announced in the Middle East and Africa. That represented a 55 percent increase from $7.79 billion in 2006, according to Bloomberg data. In the first quarter of 2008, deals announced in the region totaled $479.2 million, down from $6.27 billion a year earlier.

Carlyle Hotel

Rubenstein started Carlyle in 1987 with Conway, a former chief financial officer at MCI Communications Corp., and Daniel D'Aniello, a former vice president at hotelier Marriott Corp. They named the firm after New York's Carlyle Hotel, where the three held early meetings.

Rubenstein is a former corporate lawyer who'd worked as a domestic policy adviser to President Jimmy Carter, counseling him on the federal budget and other subjects.

Drawing on Rubenstein's Washington connections, the firm brought on advisers from the world of government, including former President George H.W. Bush, former Secretary of State James Baker, former Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci and John Major, the former British prime minister, who helped open doors. ``Carlucci could call CEOs whom we didn't have access to,'' Rubenstein says.

Carlyle initially focused on the defense industry. It bought BDM International Inc., a defense technology consultant, in 1990 for $125 million, eventually making a profit of $411 million. In 1993, the firm bought Magnavox Electronic Systems, maker of equipment that analyzed radar signals, and sold it four years later for almost twice that amount.

Gerstner's Role

In 2003, Rubenstein and his partners hired Louis Gerstner, former CEO of International Business Machines Corp., as chairman. After George W. Bush was elected president and amid publicity including Michael Moore's 2004 documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, which criticized Carlyle for its defense industry background and ties to Middle Eastern investors, Carlyle pared the ranks of its political advisers. ``We concluded that though the criticism was unfair, it was a distraction,'' Rubenstein says.

Under Gerstner, who replaced Carlucci, Carlyle has been doing buyouts of consumer companies such as Dunkin' Brands Inc., owner of the U.S. doughnut chain, which Carlyle acquired in March 2006 for $2.4 billion and still owns.

It bought France's Zodiac Marine, a maker of inflatable boats, last September for 1.4 billion euros.

Celebrities Depart

Gerstner, 66, is forcing Carlyle's founders to think about succession. All Carlyle investment managers now meet annually in Washington -- a way of identifying rising talent. ``He's a master of strategy and organizational restructuring,'' D'Aniello, 61, says of Gerstner. ``He's helping us build an institution while opening up the firm.''

Gerstner, who worked at RJR Nabisco Inc. and American Express Co. before his decade at IBM, also serves as door opener, using his connections to recruit executives for portfolio companies.

``The high-profile celebrity adviser is no longer part of the Carlyle culture,'' says Arthur Levitt, chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission from 1993 to 2001. Levitt, who joined Carlyle in '01, is also on the board of Bloomberg LP, parent of Bloomberg News.

Other current advisers include Norman Pearlstine, former editor-in-chief of Time Inc., the magazine-publishing division of Time Warner Inc., and Sandy Warner, a former chairman of JPMorgan Chase and Co.

Italian Deal

While Carlyle broadened to areas besides defense, it also made deals overseas. The firm set up its first foreign fund in Paris in 1997, when Rubenstein hired Jean-Pierre Millet, a Frenchman who'd run his own investment firm.

One company Millet, 50, set his sights on was Avio Holding SpA, the aviation and aerospace unit of Italian carmaker Fiat SpA. His Milan-based Italian buyout team visited the company during a period of several years before Fiat agreed to consider a sale. Carlyle's European staff had no aerospace expertise at the time, so Millet turned to Washington for help.

The U.S.-based aerospace group sent a team to vet Avio, with some members spending a month at a time at the company's headquarters in Turin. ``Whenever we have someone who's facing something new, it's very unusual if we don't have someone they can almost immediately bring in to help,'' Millet says of the help he got with Avio.

European Expansion

Carlyle's U.S. and European buyout funds split the equity commitment for the deal, acquiring Avio with Italy's Finmeccanica SpA for 1.5 billion euros in 2003. Three years later, the firm sold Avio to Cinven Ltd., a London-based private equity firm, for 2.57 billion euros.

Carlyle has opened offices in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden and the U.K. Carlyle Europe Partners II LP, a 1.8 billion euros fund started in 2003, has an internal rate of return of 53.4 percent, according to data compiled by Calpers, an investor.

Last year, the company added a central and eastern European office in Warsaw, headed by Ryszard Wojtkowski, a Polish national who previously worked at Novartis AG and served as a chief of staff in the Polish government.

Growth in Asia has been bumpier. Carlyle opened its first Asia buyout fund in Hong Kong in 1999, raising $750 million. Carlyle Asia Partners has posted returns of 16.6 percent -- about half of Carlyle's average, according to Calpers.

A second fund that was started in 2001, focused on smaller deals across Asia, including venture capital, has had returns of 35 percent since then, according to Calpers.

Japanese-Style Buyouts

In Japan, Carlyle spent years before getting the formula right, says Tamotsu Adachi, head of Carlyle's Japan fund in Tokyo. Since opening the office in 2000, the firm has hired three different heads of its Japan fund, most recently bringing on Adachi, who joined Carlyle in 2003 following six years at GE Capital and almost a decade at McKinsey and Co.

Adachi says he declined Rubenstein's advances at first because he didn't think Japanese businesses were ready to entertain private equity offers. ``The concept of the buyout was not well understood by the Japanese,'' he says.

Some tenets of buyouts were anathema to Japanese culture, Adachi says, including a tendency to fire management in acquired companies. ``Replacing the existing managers is not usually accepted positively,'' he says. ``We have to treat existing managers well.''

Adachi pointed to Carlyle's purchase and subsequent IPO of manufacturer Kito Corp., which the fund acquired in a management buyout for 13.4 billion yen (about $111.8 million). To keep the family engaged, Carlyle promoted Yoshio Kito, grandson of the founder, to president and eventually CEO.

Japanese Returns

Adachi tapped Carlyle colleagues overseas to help expand Kito into the Chinese market and the U.S., quadrupling profits in four years. The company went public in Tokyo last year, raising 19.1 billion yen.

At Adachi's urging, Carlyle made sure that the majority of investors in the Tokyo-based fund were Japanese, so that the benefits of any deal would go mostly back into their own economy. ``He made us be more Japanese,'' Conway says of Adachi. ``It has given us an edge in that country.''

Carlyle Japan Partners I, launched in 2001, has delivered a 47.8 percent IRR, according to the Calpers data.

Carlyle may have to wait years before it can reap that kind of return from Dubai. Mubadala's al-Muhairi says he isn't worried. ``Carlyle's an institution whose track record speaks for itself,'' he says. ``They have friends in every nook and cranny of the world.''

`Flippant' Attitude

The friends may be fewer after Rubenstein's remark that Carlyle Capital was its only fund to go bust out of a total of 60, says David Currie, CEO of SL Capital Partners LLP, a unit of Edinburgh-based insurer Standard Life Plc.

``All of us certainly raised our eyebrows,'' Currie says. ``I don't think you want to have that flippant an attitude to one of your funds getting into that kind of difficulty.'' SL Capital, which oversees about 5.9 billion euros of investments in private equity funds, doesn't have any money in Carlyle funds.

Rubenstein, meanwhile, is betting that he can find a way to turn a profit even while his industry is in purgatory. On Monday, Carlyle said it was raising a $500 million collateralized loan obligation to buy high-risk, high-yield debt that banks are selling at discounted prices, people with knowledge of the plan said. And in April, Carlyle finished raising $1.35 billion -- nearly three times its goal of $500 million -- for a new U.S.-based distressed debt fund. Carlyle Strategic Partners II is buying up loans and equities from troubled leveraged buyouts.

By Jeff Mason / Reuters

PHILADELPHIA - Pushing for a strong win to keep her White House hopes alive, Democrat Hillary Clinton touted her toughness on Monday on the eve of a showdown with presidential rival Barack Obama in Pennsylvania.

Clinton, favored to win Tuesday's contest, needs a big victory margin to boost her chances of catching Obama in the Democratic race and to head off renewed calls to end her candidacy.

Joined by her husband, former President Bill Clinton, and daughter, Chelsea, the New York senator made a final appeal for votes at a rally in a packed arena in Philadelphia.

"I believe with all my heart that it is our moment, it is the time for the people of Pennsylvania to determine not just who the Democratic nominee will be, but who the president will be and what the future course of America will be," she said.

Clinton and Obama are dueling for the Democratic nomination to face Republican John McCain in November's presidential election. Both candidates spent the day scouring Pennsylvania in a late hunt for support.

Voting in the state ends at 8 p.m. EDT (midnight GMT) with first results available soon afterward.

Clinton launched a television ad stressing her ability to handle "the toughest job in the world" and featuring images of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and damage from Hurricane Katrina.

"You need to be ready for anything -- especially now, with two wars, oil prices skyrocketing and an economy in crisis," the ad's narrator says, throwing in a reference to a famous saying by former Democratic President Harry Truman.

"If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen," the narrator says. "Who do you think has what it takes?"

Clinton has questioned whether Obama, a first-term Illinois senator, has the experience to be commander in chief. Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton noted the bin Laden imagery in the ad.

"It's ironic that she would borrow the president's tactics in her own campaign and invoke bin Laden to score political points," he said. "We already have a president who plays the politics of fear, and we don't need another."

After several days of sharp attacks on Clinton, Obama began the final day focused on pocketbook issues such as the cost of gasoline, taxes and jobs.

"We've had a terrific contest between myself and Senator Clinton and the other candidates who were originally involved," Obama told a forum with middle-class voters in the town of Blue Bell outside of Philadelphia.

"Democrats are pretty unified around some ideas," Obama said, citing the desire to provide universal health care and tackle global warming.

PLAYING DOWN EXPECTATIONS

Both camps tried to play down expectations in Pennsylvania, where Clinton's once double-digit lead has dwindled to single digits in many polls as Obama has outspent her heavily.

"I think it's going to be pretty close and we're campaigning hard," Obama said.

Obama told a rally in McKeesport, near Pittsburgh it was it was unfair for the media to question him about his patriotism as happened during an ABC news debate last week when he was asked whether he believed in the American flag and why he did not always wear a flag pin on his lapel.

"It frustrates me that people would even have a question about something like that because they don't ask the same questions of some of the other candidates," he said. "That concerns me."

Obama leads Clinton in delegates to the August convention in Denver, but neither can clinch the nomination without the help of superdelegates -- nearly 800 party insiders who are free to support either candidate.

Obama also picked up an endorsement from fiery filmmaker Michael Moore, who made he anti-Bush documentary "Fahrenheit 911."

"What we are witnessing is not just a candidate but a profound, massive public movement for change. My endorsement is more for Obama The Movement than it is for Obama the candidate," Moore wrote in a letter posted on his Web site.

Clinton hopes a big win in Pennsylvania and a strong run through the nine remaining Democratic contests will convince superdelegates she is the candidate who can capture the big states crucial to a November election victory.

Clinton has resisted calls from Obama supporters to pull out of the race and let him focus on the election battle against McCain.

McCain launched a five-day tour of economically struggling areas rarely visited by Republicans. He opened in Selma, Alabama, at a landmark of the U.S. civil rights movement -- the bridge where state police attacked more than 500 civil rights demonstrators in 1965 on a day known as "Bloody Sunday."

McCain's trip also will take him to the hard-hit steel town of Youngstown, Ohio, the Appalachia region of Kentucky and hurricane-stricken New Orleans.

(Additional reporting by Steve Holland, Caren Bohan and Jeff Mason; writing by John Whitesides, editing by Chris Wilson)

Associated Press

LOS ANGELES - Michael Moore wants voters in Pennsylvania to cast their ballots for Barack Obama.

Moore endorsed Obama in a 1,100-word posting on his Web site Monday. It includes praise for the Illinois senator and harsh words for Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Democratic Party and the Bush administration.

Lamenting the lack of a valid primary in his home state of Michigan, Moore writes that Obama's experience and voting record aren't as important as his "basic decency" and ability to inspire.

"What we are witnessing is not just a candidate but a profound, massive public movement for change," Moore writes. "My endorsement is more for Obama The Movement than it is for Obama the candidate."

The 54-year-old Oscar-winning filmmaker was hardly as kind to Clinton.

"Over the past two months, the actions and words of Hillary Clinton have gone from being merely disappointing to downright disgusting," he writes, saying that she has tried to "smear" Obama — "Like you were nuts. Like you were a bigot stoking the fires of stupidity."

Most of Moore's ire is directed at the Bush administration "and the permanent, irreversible damage it has done to our people and to this world."

"I, like the majority of Americans, have been pummeled senseless for eight long years," he writes. "That's why I will join millions of citizens and stagger into the voting booth come November, like a boxer in the 12th round, all bloodied and bruised with one eye swollen shut, looking for the only thing that matters — that big 'D' on the ballot."

Moore says he is disappointed with the Democratic Party, too, for failing to end the war despite public outcry and for "do(ing) the bidding of the corporate elite in this country. Any endorsement of a Democrat must be done with this acknowledgment ..."

Moore declined to elaborate further when contacted by The Associated Press.

PITTSBURGH, Pennsylvania (AFP) — Barack Obama's camp accused Hillary Clinton Monday of trying to scare voters on the eve of the Pennsylvania primary, as she rocked their White House race with a dark campaign ad featuring Osama bin Laden.

The Democratic foes squabbled over who was qualified for what Clinton calls "the toughest job in the world" during a frenzied sprint to Tuesday's nominating showdown, which polls suggested she would win.

As the campaigns cranked up huge turnout operations, attention was turning to the scale of any Clinton victory. Most observers think she needs a wide margin to breathe life into her uphill bid for the Democratic nomination.

Clinton's ad featured Pearl Harbor, Al-Qaeda mastermind bin Laden and Hurricane Katrina, mirroring a "3:00 am phone call" spot credited with helping her to win in Texas and Ohio last month.

She played off the script of her ad during a lunchtime rally in downtown Pittsburgh.

"If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen," Clinton said, using former US president Harry Truman's famous catchphrase. "I am very comfortable in that kitchen making those decisions."

As the narrator of the Clinton ad speaks, images flash by of the fall of the Berlin Wall, bin Laden and the devastating hurricane that swamped New Orleans in 2005.

"You need to be ready for anything -- especially now, with two wars, oil prices skyrocketing and an economy in crisis," the male narrator intones. "Who do you think has what it takes?"

The 30-second broadcast does not mention Obama by name, but the Illinois senator's spokesman Bill Burton fired off a robust response and brought up Clinton's vote in 2002 to authorize the Iraq war, which his boss opposed.

"It's ironic that she would borrow the president's tactics in her own campaign and invoke bin Laden to score political points," Burton said.

"We already have a president who plays the politics of fear, and we don't need another," he said.

The New York senator also pressed home her claim that despite trailing Obama in nominating wins and elected delegates, she was still the most likely Democrat to beat Republican John McCain in November.

"He (Obama) can be elected; I will be elected," Clinton told the Philadelphia Inquirer, and accused Obama of going negative in the final hours of the battle for Pennsylvania, which heralds the 10-contest endgame of the contentious White House battle.

Late polls appeared to show that Clinton was again set for victory in a state packed with her working-class supporters, although by far less than the 20-point margin she once enjoyed in the polls.

She led Obama 52 percent to 42 percent in a Suffolk University survey. A Quinnipiac University poll had her up 51-44 percent, one point up from last week in the same survey.

But in an interview with Pittsburgh radio station KDKA, Obama said he would do well.

"I am not predicting a win. I am predicting it is going to be close and we are going to do a lot better than people expect," he said.

Clinton's huge task in overcoming her rival in the Democratic race was revealed by the latest figures showing Obama's staggering advantage in fundraising.

The Federal Election Commission filings showed the Illinois senator had 42 million dollars in cash in hand for the primary season at the start of April. Clinton had only nine million dollars in hand.

The Clinton campaign said Obama was outspending her three to one in Pennsylvania.

"If Senator Obama can't win a big swing state like Pennsylvania with that enormous spending advantage, just what will it take for him to win a large swing state?" Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson said.

Neither Democrat is expected to reach the tally of 2,025 nominating delegates to claim the nomination outright.

So Clinton needs to convince nearly 800 superdelegates -- top party officials who can vote how they like at the party's August convention -- that it would be too risky to pick the inexperienced Obama.

Oscar-winning documentary film-maker Michael Moore Monday endorsed Obama, decrying Clinton's "downright disgusting" campaign tactics which he said were designed to "smear the black man."

WASHINGTON (AFP) — Outspoken documentary film-maker Michael Moore Monday endorsed Democratic White House hopeful Barack Obama, decrying the "downright disgusting" campaign tactics of Hillary Clinton.

Moore, whose latest movie "Captain Mike Across America" tracks John Kerry's doomed 2004 bid for the presidency, said he had not given a "rat's ass" who won the nomination this year as long as a Democrat triumphs in November.

But having excoriated Clinton for her 2002 vote in support of the Iraq war, the Oscar-winning writer and director now accused the New York senator of "stoking the fears of white America" against the mixed-race Obama.

Writing on his website on the eve of the Pennsylvania primary, Moore said that in recent weeks, "the actions and words of Hillary Clinton have gone from being merely disappointing to downright disgusting."

He cited Clinton's mention of radical US Islamic leader Louis Farrakhan during a televised debate last week, in connection with Obama's controversial former pastor Jeremiah Wright.

That, according to Moore, was an attempt to "smear the black man" (Obama) so as to sway Democratic grandees known as superdelegates who look set to decide the presidential nomination.

"You have devoted your life to good causes and good deeds," Moore said in addressing Clinton, but now she was like "a bigot stoking the fires of stupidity."

The director of "Sicko" and "Fahrenheit 9/11" said he was endorsing the movement for change represented by the "exceptional" Obama, in order to end the war in Iraq and to hold corporate America to account.

And Moore said the Democrats could yet lose to Republican John McCain in November.

"We know there are still many Americans who will never vote for a black man. Hillary knows it, too. She's counting on it."

Associated Press

Many politicians and consumer advocates (and filmmaker Michael Moore) have been telling Americans for years that their health insurance coverage leaves much to be desired.

A new survey backed by the AFL-CIO union indicates how unsatisfied Americans are with the U.S. health care system.

Half of people in families with insurance apparently still can't afford all their care.

And 48 percent say they or a family member has unhappily stuck with a job just to keep health care benefits.

Even though 77 percent of survey respondents had health insurance for their households, one-third of those surveyed still said they skipped needed medical care because it was too expensive.

"Of the more than 26,000 people who took this survey, most are insured and employed. Most are college graduates," AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said recently. "These are the people you would expect to have positive experiences with America's health care system. ... They're hurting."

The AFL-CIO and its community affiliate, Working America, sponsored the online Health Care for America Survey, taken by 26,419 people this past winter.

By Justine Sharrock / Mother Jones

The prisons in Iraq stink. Ask any guard or interrogator and they'll tell you it's a smell they'll never forget: sweat, fear and rot. On the base where Ben Allbright served from May to September 2003, a small outfit named Tiger in western Iraq, water was especially scarce; Ben would rig a hose to a water bottle in a feeble attempt to shower. He and the other Army reservists tried mopping the floors, but the cheap solvents only added a chemical note to the stench. During the day, when the temperature was in the triple digits, the smell fermented.

It got even hotter in the Conex container, the kind you see on top of 18-wheelers, where Ben kept his prisoners. Not uncommonly the thermometer inside read 135, even 145 degrees. The Conex box was the first stop for all prisoners brought to the base, most of them Iraqis swept up during mass raids. Ben kept them blindfolded, their hands bound behind their backs with plastic zip ties, without food or sleep, for up to 48 hours at a time. He made them stand in awkward positions, so that they could not rest their heads against the wall. Sometimes he blared loud music, such as Ozzy or AC/DC, blew air horns, banged on the container, or shouted. "Whatever it took to make sure they'd stay awake," he explains.

Ben was not a "bad apple," and he didn't make up these treatments. He was following standard operating procedure as ordered by military intelligence officers. The MI guys didn't make up the techniques either; they have a long international history as effective torture methods. Though generally referred to by circumlocutions such as "harsh techniques," "softening up," and "enhanced interrogation," they have been medically shown to have the same effects as other forms of torture. Forced standing, for example, causes ankles to swell to twice their size within 24 hours, making walking excruciating and potentially causing kidney failure.

Ben says he never saw anything like that. The detainees didn't faint or go insane, as people have been known to do under similar conditions, but they also "weren't exactly lucid." And, he notes, "I was hardly getting any sleep myself."

When I first set off to interview the rank-and-file guards and interrogators tasked with implementing the administration's torture guidelines, I thought they'd never talk openly. They would be embarrassed, wracked by guilt, living in silent shame in communities that would ostracize them if they knew of their histories. What I found instead were young men hiding their regrets from neighbors who wanted to celebrate them as war heroes. They seemed relieved to talk with me about things no one else wanted to hear -- not just about the acts themselves, but also about the guilt, pain and anger they felt along with pride and righteousness about their service. They struggled with these things, wanted to make sense of them -- even as the nation seemed determined to dismiss the whole matter and move on.

This, perhaps, is the real scandal of Abu Ghraib: In survey after survey, as many as two-thirds of Americans say torture is justified when it's used to get information from terrorists. In an ABC/Washington Post poll in the wake of the 2004 scandal, 60 percent of respondents classified what happened at Abu Ghraib as mere abuse, not torture. And as recently as last year, 68 percent of Americans told Pew Research pollsters that they consider torture an acceptable option when dealing with terrorists.

Critics of the administration's interrogation policies warn that the ramifications will be felt across the globe, including by Americans unlucky enough to be imprisoned abroad. Foreign policy scholars fear the fallout from Abu Ghraib has already weakened the U.S. military's anti-terrorism capabilities. Lawyers warn about war crime tribunals. But hardly anyone is discussing the repercussions already being felt here at home. It's the soldiers tying the sandbags around Iraqis' necks and blaring the foghorns through the night who are experiencing the effects most acutely. And the communities they're returning to are reeling as a result.

When I went to visit Ben in Little Rock, Ark., I wanted to know why this charming, intelligent, and overly polite 27-year-old had done what he'd done. For 10 days we rode around in his beat-up maroon 1970s Mercedes -- running errands, picking up job applications, meeting his girlfriend for lunch. Ben wore pink shirts, hipster blazers and color-coordinated Campers; he used hair products, which to his friends meant being a metrosexual; he listened to indie rock, watched "The Daily Show" and wrote attitude-filled blogs on veterans' rights, which meant being a liberal. He refereed football games, worshipped novelist Dave Eggers and placed special orders at McDonald's so his meals would be fresh.

He was unemployed, fired from his latest job as a bank teller the day before I arrived. Ben had worked there for four months -- the longest he'd held down a full-time job since coming home from Iraq. He'd tried tutoring high schoolers, bagging groceries and doing IT support for Best Buy. Part of the problem, he said, was the lack of good jobs in the area, part of it his own "flailing and procrastinating." He had toyed with the idea of law school and scored a near-perfect 178 on the LSAT entrance test, but then turned down offers from schools such as NYU. While I was in town he picked up an application for a job at his corner liquor store. In high school he was one of two students voted most likely to become famous. "The other kid became a doctor," Ben confessed, "and I, well, yeah …"

As a kid, Ben was a sort of Doogie Howser, blowing through school, asking teachers for more work, until his mom, fearing the classes weren't challenging enough, pulled him out in the fourth grade in order to home-school him. His parents finally bought a TV set when Ben was in eighth grade. Ben says his dad was an original member of Pat Robertson's 700 Club. He was an executive for American Airlines, a job that moved the family around a lot: St. Louis, Kansas City, Nashville. After they lost their nest egg in the 1987 stock market crash, the family moved from Chicago's lakeshore suburbs to the South Side. Finally, when Ben was a teenager, they settled in Lonoke, outside Little Rock.

Ben took me to the town, 4,300 people and 22 churches. Tractors dotted the fields that hadn't yet been grabbed by developers. He noted a "Free Greens" sign advertising leftovers from someone's garden and the customary wave from passing cars. His condescension about the "bumblef**k" town cracked when he showed me a plot of land near one that his buddy had just bought that he saw as a potential home for a future family.

Ben pointed out the Grace Baptist Church, which he attends because he's friends with the pastor and his son, "not because I agree with their fundamentalist views." As an undergraduate at the University of Arkansas, Ben explored Buddhism and Taoism, but he returned to Christianity as a way to make sense of the world, even though sometimes it's "awkward reconciling my religion and military profession."

Ben was still in high school when he enlisted as a reservist; his friend Brandon had asked Ben to accompany him to the recruiter's office as a "bullshit detector." In the end, he enrolled along with Brandon, applying twice before he finally bulked up enough to meet the weight requirement. He saw it as a chance to get out from under his parents' thumb and learn about computers. But mainly it was his idealistic sense of duty -- right out of Starship Troopers, the 1959 Robert Heinlein novel that is now a cult hit in military circles. "Like in the book, there's the idea that to be a full citizen you have to contribute."

Ben was called up to go to Iraq in February 2003. His father told him the invasion seemed like a mistake, but they didn't have time to discuss the subject much; he died of cancer a month later. Half an hour after the funeral, Ben was on his way to Kuwait.

In Iraq, Ben was assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division; since there was no computer work for him to do, he was made a prison guard.

Things on the Tiger base were pretty "ad hoc," Ben recalls. Some orders, like the mandate that the heavy Kevlar helmets be fastened at the chin at all times, were clearly posted on the wall. Others were left to word of mouth, including instructions about detainee handling. Military intelligence officers issued various orders; then there were the anonymous OGAs, aka other government agencies, code for either private contractors or CIA oficers with civilian clothes, long beards and fake names like Joe Stallone and Frank Norris. The chain of command was chaotic.

Ben was soon promoted to warden and made small changes on his shift: Guards had to limit stress positions, and detainee rations were increased from crackers and peanut butter to whole Meals Ready to Eat, which were served three times, not two times, a day. He enforced a ban on cameras to discourage the degrading treatment that usually came when soldiers posed with prisoners for trophy photos. "But I could only do so much," he admits.

When he was first ordered to soften up detainees, "it didn't seem so weird," Ben says; nothing in the war zone was normal. "You don't think about what you're doing until later." He was asked to stand in on dozens of interrogations to help intimidate the subject: one more body, one more gun. The small room was usually crowded with guards, military intelligence officers, and OGAs. They were told to wear T-shirts, not uniforms that would signal their rank. Under the single bulb, the interrogator would loom above a prisoner seated in a child-size chair. Sometimes the room suddenly went dark and strobe lights flashed on. Other times the soldiers would bang pots and pans in the detainee's face, blare loud music, blast air horns and sirens. The sounds were meant to disorient, but also to mask the screams. More than half the time, even if they were cooperative, the detainees were beaten, kicked out of their chairs, punched in the windpipe or gut, pulled by the ears -- blows that wouldn't leave lasting marks. Occasionally things got out of hand, but with their medical training, the military intelligence officers could stitch up or bandage injuries, avoiding a call to the medics and an entry in the logbooks that the Red Cross could read.

The first time Ben saw a detainee get beaten, he took the lead interrogator aside afterward to ask, "Was this stuff really allowed? Didn't it violate the Geneva Conventions?"

"These aren't POWs; they're detainees," he was told. "Those rules are antiquated and don't apply. You can't get any information without breaking that stuff." Ben asked other officers, but "it was basically like, 'Dude, you're actually worried about how we're treating them? They wouldn't afford you the same respect.'"

If there is anything Ben hates, it's not having all the information. Like most, he hadn't listened when the Geneva Conventions were covered in basic training. But as it happened, when first arriving in the country, he'd asked a military lawyer for a CD-ROM of various documents, just to have on hand. Now, scrolling through the text on his laptop, Ben saw what anyone could: All prisoners -- civilians and combatants -- are protected against violence. There is no separate category for unlawful combatants. "Outrages upon personal dignity" and "humiliating and degrading treatment" are prohibited. Abuses like those at the Tiger base were "grave breaches." War crimes.

Ben made a verbal complaint to his platoon leader and later to his platoon leader's boss, asking for an investigation. The officers seemed surprised. "They said they'd look into it and tell their superiors," Ben recalls. "But it didn't seem like a priority." Nothing happened.

"I'm not one of those hardcore 'Duty! Honor! Country!' guys," explains Ben. "But I had signed a contract with rules and obligations. I figured that I did the responsible thing by notifying people. I felt helpless not being able to do more. But at least I'd covered my end." He tried quizzing the guards under him about the Geneva Conventions, but they "just wanted to f**k with people." He developed a reputation as a softy.

In the summer of 2003, the interrogators threw a detainee against a concrete wall, punched him in the neck and gut, kicked him in the knees, threw him outside and dragged him back in by his hair. For the entire two-hour ordeal, the prisoner wouldn't talk; Ben later found out he spoke Farsi and couldn't understand the interrogators' English and Arabic. Afterward, Ben hid behind a building and cried for the first time since his dad's death. "It was like a loss of humanity. Like we were trading one dictator in for another. I had to weigh my integrity against my duty. Why couldn't I stand up more? Why was I hesitant?"

Ben told me this as we were sitting in his bedroom back home in Little Rock; by the end of the story, he had climbed into bed and pulled blankets up around him and was hugging a pillow. There were tears in his eyes, and he apologized for being so "weird about this stuff." Ben writes poetry, and he's fiercely loyal to his Army buddies. But now, for the briefest moment, I saw rage in his eyes.

War, Ben was discovering, is "not like what you see on TV. It's insanely boring and depressing." His trip home at Thanksgiving in 2003 lasted just long enough for him to discover that his girlfriend had a new man. Back at Tiger, he joined a group of grunts watching a Michael Moore DVD. It struck a chord with them. "I was never political before I went to Iraq. But I was already disgruntled and fed up just being in Iraq. The movie made me angrier."

It wasn't Fahrenheit 9/11 that so resonated with the soldiers; it was Roger and Me, a documentary that follows the decline of Flint, Mich., after the General Motors plants closed down. Ben saw "connections between U.S. policies away and at home, how the administration is willing to sacrifice regular people. They were throwing people out of their homes in Flint just like we were taking people out of their homes in Iraq. We got all misty-eyed. It was emotional and had a lingering effect on us."

Ben began to think about what was behind the abuses he'd seen. Soldiers were sent off to war with the promise that they'd be heroes. They had been trained to kill bad guys, not baby-sit detainees. "You need to think that you're there for a reason, that there is some purpose," Ben says. But now people at home were saying the war was a mistake; body counts were mere blips in the news. When Ben first arrived in Iraq, he played soccer with locals; a few months later Iraqis wouldn't even set foot on the base. More and more, the soldiers turned their anger on the prisoners. They poked them with rifles, called them "towel heads" and "sand niggers." Guards would let other soldiers "snag a guy to f**k with or whatever, as long as it didn't leave a mark."

About a month after Ben left Tiger for good, an insurgency leader detained there, Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush, was suffocated in a sleeping bag -- a technique that, like waterboarding, Ben had heard was used but had never seen. The General, as he was known, was one of the 160-plus detainees who have died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan since August 2002, according to ACLU attorney Hina Shamsi. Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer, the man accused of murdering Mowhoush, claimed he'd been following orders. In 2006, he was convicted of negligent homicide and dereliction of duty and sentenced to 60 days of barracks confinement, the equivalent of house arrest.

After Ben came home in March 2004, he was treated warmly. "I was at Applebee's one night and a guy overheard that I had just come back from Iraq," he recalls, "so he bought me a Jack and Coke." He was offered discounts on cell phones and cars. "I finally felt appreciated after feeling used for so long."

But the welcomes couldn't silence the questions that kept him up at night. Ben loves to debate, perhaps because he usually wins, but now he was endlessly, fruitlessly arguing with himself. "Every human being instinctively knows right from wrong. There is never a justification for torture." But then again, "Is softening people up wrong on some levels? I don't know. It wasn't beneficial to them, but it was presented as necessary." He had seen a side of himself he didn't know existed, and now he had to live with that. "In combat you question your mortality," he told me. "In these prisons you question your morality."

I asked Ben point-blank if he considered himself a torturer. It was a hard question to ask, a harder one to answer. He said he didn't know. He asked me how other soldiers in his situation had responded. Most, I told him, didn't even brook use of the word "torture" instead of "harsh interrogation." He finally said he guessed he didn't want to have to think of himself that way, and that it was time to go meet his girlfriend.

When he first got back from Iraq, Ben had nightmares and couldn't remember things; this was infuriating, since he'd always prided himself on his perfect memory. A psychiatrist diagnosed him with PTSD, but he refused medication. Instead he blew $14,000 on bar tabs his first four months home. "I drank every night. I'd wake up next to a stranger at around 4 p.m. and head off to the strip club again." He traveled some, because "you can reinvent yourself when you're out of town." He also re-enlisted; he'll be on active duty until 2013, which means that once a month he has to cut his perfectly messy hair and show up at the local base. He thinks the military needs people like him, "people who can see both sides of things."

When Ben first started speaking out about torture, posting to blogs and testifying for a human rights group, he didn't use his real name. Then, gradually, he grew bolder. Brandon, his high school friend, Army buddy, and now roommate, encouraged him, so long as he wasn't trying to become famous. He got the occasional blog flame -- "un-American commie bastard" -- but there was none of the reprisal from the Army that he'd feared. Nor, for that matter, any call from the various military investigators looking into human rights abuses. No one seemed to care.

People cared when Spc. Joseph Darby spoke out, though not always in the way he would have wanted them to. Darby is the Army reservist who turned in the Abu Ghraib photos. He hates the term "whistleblower," which is understandable, since it's earned him others like "rat" and "traitor." He's gotten death threats, from phone calls and emails to just whispers around his hometown of Cumberland, Md. His sister-in-law's house was vandalized; his wife was verbally harassed and the police refused to help.

I met with Darby at a Starbucks in a strip mall along a busy four-lane route. He is still in a sort of witness protection program the military put him in after his role in the scandal was revealed. He didn't want me to detail his appearance, which has changed somewhat from the recognizable round face that appeared in magazines and on television. This, he said, was his last interview before he put Abu Ghraib behind him forever.

He said being in hiding wasn't so tough; he'd always kept to himself. His marriage was rocky while he was in Iraq, and seclusion had forced the couple back together. Whenever our conversation got difficult, he fiddled with his wedding ring.

Darby joined the Army Reserves for tuition money when he was 17, but he never did end up going to college. Instead, after returning from a deployment in Bosnia in June 2002, he found construction work off the books. Eight months later, he was called up again to go to Iraq. When his unit was assigned to guard prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Darby asked for a job where he wouldn't have too much contact with the detainees; with his temper, he didn't trust himself around the Iraqis. He became the guy you called to get a mop, garbage bags or meals brought up to the tiers.

Unlike Ben, Darby didn't witness any abuse; he came across the torture photos by accident. The desert heat had warped his own snapshots, so he asked Cpl. Charles Graner for some pictures, hoping for images of camels and tanks. Scrolling through the CD, he laughed when he saw the pyramid of naked Iraqis. Then he got to the simulated-fellatio pictures.

He insists he's not a goody-two-shoes tattletale or a saint by any stretch. "I'm as crooked as the next MP," he explains. "I've bent laws and I've broke laws." Months earlier, Graner (who is now serving a 10-year sentence) had shown him a photo of a prisoner tied up in a stress position and said, "The Christian in me knows this is wrong, but the corrections officer in me can't help but love to make a grown man piss himself." Darby says he was too tired to think much about it.

It took him three weeks of soul-searching to decide whether he should turn in the photos. He finally took them not to his superior officers but to the Army investigation office, where soldiers can report everything from sexual harassment to theft -- a breach of the chain of command that many would later hold against him. Four months later, Darby was sitting in the Abu Ghraib mess hall; CNN was on, showing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's congressional testimony on prisoner abuse. Darby had no idea his tip -- which military investigators had assured him would remain anonymous -- had led to a national scandal. He heard Rumsfeld name various people who'd provided information -- "first the soldier, Spc. Joseph Darby, who alerted the appropriate authorities … My thanks and appreciation to him for his courage and his values."

Darby dropped his fork midbite. Oh shit. He felt 400 pairs of eyes on him. Seymour Hersh had already published his name, but as Darby says, "Who reads the damn New Yorker?"

His mom was dying of cancer; now, the compassionate-leave request he had filed a week before was rushed through. When his plane touched down stateside, officers were there with his wife. They escorted the couple to an undisclosed location where they lived with around-the-clock security for the next six months. He didn't get the formal thank you he'd expected from the Army, though a personal letter from Rumsfeld arrived at one point -- asking him to stop talking about how he'd been outed.

When the Abu Ghraib photos splashed on television sets, people in Cumberland watched, hoping their loved ones weren't involved. Not all were so lucky. Kenneth England saw the pictures of his daughter, Lynndie, as did the welders and machinists who work with him at the CSX railroad. They supported him as best they knew how: by not mentioning it. While Pentagon flacks spun the scandal as the work of a few bad apples from Appalachia, people in the area hung yellow ribbons and "Hometown Hero" posters for the accused MPs. Reservists' wives organized candlelight vigils.

"Everybody needs his time over there to mean or count for something," Sgt. Ken Davis, a teetotaler nicknamed Preacher Man by the other MPs at Abu Ghraib, told me. "It has to be right in the greater scheme of things. But if the U.S. government was truly at the helm, ordering the abuse, then it actually means nothing. And now we live with ghosts and demons that will haunt us for the rest of our lives."

Davis, who has a clean, bleachy smell to him and says "dang" a lot, was in some of the photos, and he says he reported the abuse to his superior. For that, people at the police department near Cumberland, where he worked, call him a narc. He's become an Abu Ghraib junkie, attending the trials, testifying at some, collecting photos and evidence, corresponding with the accused. It's a way, he says, to get closure. "A lot of soldiers, when we come back, are lost. You don't belong anymore. It's especially true for a unit accused of abuse, when you hear lies about what happened and people deny what you saw." At 37, he's particularly worried about the younger soldiers he served with. "They were put in situations where they had to do things they didn't agree with just to survive," he says. "All they know about being an adult is the military. We've got a lost generation on our hands."

Military recruiters always had it easy in Cumberland. Beyond honor, responsibility and meaning, they pitched a paycheck and a ticket out. It was on the steps of Cumberland's City Hall that Lyndon B. Johnson first announced his War on Poverty back in 1964, but neither the coal mining industry, the railway nor a series of short-lived manufacturing booms could win that battle. Of the big factories in the area, only the paper mill is still open. One in five residents live below the poverty line, a third more than the national average. A food bank operates out of a former bread factory. In February 2007, a high school football player shot himself during a game of Russian roulette.

I often asked people in town what they thought about the war, but conversation inevitably turned to jobs. Supporting the troops was akin to union solidarity -- a pact among the people doing the country's grunt work. As one ex-Marine told me, "Sometimes you just have to do what you can to get by. And you have to be able to believe in the validity of what you're doing."

People told me the threat against Darby was exaggerated. The university's chaplain had been harassed for hosting an anti-war event, the newspaper's columnist threatened for advocating gun control, but no harm had come to either of them. Colin Engelbach, the commander of the local VFW post--who called Darby a "borderline traitor" on national television -- said that by "get him," people just meant they would make Darby's life hell.

Engelbach is a small guy whose eyes had trouble meeting mine. He spent ten years in the National Guard and four on active duty, though he didn't see combat. Now he works double shifts making depleted uranium munitions at Alliant Tech. For several months after our interview, he called me with "dirt" on Darby; the overall message was that Darby had put himself before his comrades, that he was not a real American.

"People aren't pissed because I turned someone in for abuse," Darby told me. "People are pissed because I turned in an American soldier for abusing an Iraqi. They don't care about right and wrong."

Five miles down from Cumberland, Cresaptown, home to the 372nd Military Police Company's headquarters, is little more than the junction of U.S. Highway 220 and Route 53. There's no town hall, the civic improvement center is shuttered and old toys sit forgotten on the front porches of houses behind low wire fences. It's only a few steps from Pete's Tavern to the Big Claw bar and the Eagles Club, which a few years back launched a minor scandal by admitting a black man. ("He may be a nigger, but he's also a cop," one Pete's regular told me, "so they had to let him in.")

Driving down the hill into Cresaptown, the first thing you notice is the sweeping expanse of glimmering barbed wire and corrugated metal buildings that house the roughly 1,700 inmates and 500 employees of the Western Correctional Institution. The 161-acre property used to be the Celanese factory, where you could swim in the public pool for a quarter. Next door is the brand new $24.8 million prison, built by out-of-state contractors and lauded as a state-of-the-art maximum-security facility. The 372nd's inconspicuous brick building is down the road, past the Liberty Christian Fellowship, the technical high school (whose sign declares "teamwork" the word of the month) and the Boy Scout building.

On most afternoons you'll find John Kershner, a sergeant with the 372nd, sitting at the Big Claw smoking his USA brand menthols with his change lined up on the bar, ready for his next dollar-fifty Miller Lite. The night I was there "Sarge" was talking more than he had in a while, he admitted. He was polite in an old-time kind of way, making a point of taking off his well-worn Eagles Club hat indoors, revealing a balding, shaved head. His light blue eyes were shielded behind his thick glasses. Sarge knows Darby well; he was the guy who hired him to work off the books at his self-storage construction company after the two served together in Bosnia -- though it was Darby who told me about this later, not Kershner. "People here feel more hurt by this whole thing than anything," Sarge whispered into my ear. "I just wish Darby would shut his mouth and let the rest of us move on."

Sarge had to sell his construction business when he deployed to Iraq. Now employers tell him he's either overqualified or, at a war-weathered 56, too old. He's been filing for his veteran's benefits for two years now but continues to get the runaround. He knows what most everyone in the bar does for a living -- he's a roofer, he's a pharmacist, she's a beautician. "I'm not saying that the photos were correct," one of the other patrons, his work boots still muddy, told me. "But our people had their heads cut off."

"Other countries can torture our men to death and it's OK, but if we drop one decimal dip below our standards, you have guys paying the price," Sarge said. "Now you need permission to even shoot back when you're under attack. You let them win there, and we'll be fighting here next."

There is a peace group in Cumberland. It's spearheaded by Larry Neumark, the Protestant chaplain at local Frostburg State University whose cardigan sweaters and soft voice conjure up Mr. Rogers. Early on in the war, the group -- mostly composed of faculty from Frostburg and nearby community colleges, who clung to each other as a "lifeline" -- struggled for attention. "You'll be accused of being unpatriotic and un-American if you speak up," said Neumark. A local college has rejected courses with "peace" in the title as unpatriotic. "But in the last six to seven months people have been more willing to talk."

When I first visited Cumberland in December 2006, Neumark told me that he had caught hell for inviting Ray McGovern, a retired CIA officer, to speak on campus against the war. By last spring, he was having a hard time filling the pro-war slot on a panel discussion he was setting up. Torture, though, was another story. Neumark had proposed a discussion about the topic, but people were "very on edge" about it, as Daniel Hull, a member of the group, told me. Even the activists were split on whether they should "go in that direction."

Eventually Neumark did pull together his panel, featuring a man who had been tortured in the Philippines during the Marcos regime. About 100 students, many of them earning class credits, listened to him recall mock executions and solitary confinement. One student argued that the Geneva Conventions were outdated. "Has fear been used to effectively deaden our critical senses?" Neumark asked. An audience member stomped out. In the back someone snoozed. "Torture is a form of terrorism," offered Neumark. "Why do you think people aren't speaking out about this?" No one had an answer.

In Ben's two-bedroom apartment in a suburban complex, the shades are always down and the lights are dimmed. An Ikea rug covers the cheap wall-to-wall carpeting, Yellow Tail wine bottles line the mantle, Aristotle and Dostoevsky serve as toilet reading and a large-screen TV with a PlayStation 2 dominates the living room. Ben shares the place with Brandon, who circumvented the post-war job problem by taking a civilian job at the nearby Army base. He seems more stereotypically military than Ben, with wide biceps, close-cropped hair, and a closetful of Army T-shirts. But he writes poetry and acoustic songs about things such as post-traumatic stress and how he almost reflexively hit his girlfriend one day and never regained her trust.

One afternoon, with a sitcom on TV and his dog skidding around the sofa, I grilled Ben about torture. After returning from Iraq, he studied the philosophical theories surrounding the issue to prepare for just these kinds of conversations -- particularly in case he ever got to talk to Sen. John McCain, to whom he'd written during the drafting of the Detainee Treatment Act. We discussed the ticking-time-bomb argument -- the hypothetical challenge arguing the morality of torturing someone who knows where a bomb is hidden -- which Ben called "total bullshit" since "we aren't living in some fantasy 24 kind of world where those sorts of situations occur." Besides, he said, torture will induce false confessions. And most of the detainees at Tiger didn't even have anything to confess; like 70 to 90 percent of those jailed across Iraq, according to a 2004 Red Cross report, they'd been arrested by mistake.

When the Abu Ghraib photos came out, Ben was on a trip around Europe. He pretended to be Canadian, and the whole thing pained him -- because he's a patriot and because the images brought back memories. "It was like a bad nostalgia," he said. "But it was also embarrassing. I just didn't want to be associated with it."

When I asked Ben if Brandon judged him for what he did in Iraq, he said they don't really talk about it. "It's two separate parts of our lives, and we keep it that way," Ben explained. "It's like, 'Iraq sucked. Now get on with it.'" He said he doesn't talk about it to anyone close to him -- he'd tell his mom, he said, but she has never asked and he doesn't want to bother her.

His girlfriend, Gretchen, flat out doesn't want to know. Gretchen trained Ben as a teller at the bank. She's gorgeous, with long dark hair and tall leather boots. Within a week, they were making out; six months later, she's sure he's the one. They seemed too young to be talking about marriage until I saw their friends with kids, mortgages and ex-spouses.

I asked Gretchen if we could have coffee. "It's not like I know anything about what happened over there," she said. "I probably should, but he doesn't talk about it, and I don't want to think about it." Gretchen blushed when she asked me what Abu Ghraib was. ("She doesn't know much about politics," commented Ben, "and that's to put it nicely.") "I realize I'm naive," she said. "I get upset about stuff that's sad on TV." She didn't have a "real opinion about the war. I figure the people in charge know more, so I trust them."

But Gretchen did know how Ben would "tear up" sometimes, like when he was fired from the bank, even though he said it was no big deal, or how he only stayed for five minutes when he visited his dad's grave, or how he used to wake up in the middle of the night shouting. She thought Ben liked her not being political because she didn't argue with him. I thought he liked the escape.

When I was in Little Rock in January 2007, Ben was chastising himself for not having spoken out more about the war. He had just bought a new Web domain, WaitingToPanic.net, to consolidate his blogs and had big plans for building his veterans site, Operation Comeback, into a full-on grassroots movement. Human Rights Watch had encouraged him to work for them, and he thought that was a great idea. But he was also excited about cheap properties in the area, and when he got upset by our conversations about Iraq, he told me he'd been trying to "block it out a little bit."

A year later, when I checked in with him again, he had bought a brand-new three-bedroom house in Lonoke, the town where he'd grown up. Gretchen had moved in with him. He was working with the military as a communications expert -- the "resident computer geek," as he put it -- at the local base. He was up for a promotion to warrant officer candidate. His new website was blank, and he hadn't posted on his blogs in months. And Sen. McCain had never called.

"I'm told that I'm courageous for speaking out," he said. "But I wonder if I get blamed enough for the bad things I've done. Did I stand up enough? Using a situation to justify it, like I did, doesn't make it right. It's the sense of being helpless that still weighs heavily on my soul."

Record-Eagle

TRAVERSE CITY -- The decision is exactly what Michael Moore expected.

The filmmaker and part-time northern Michigan resident has never lost a lawsuit, he said, and a recent unanimous federal appeals court ruling that he did not defame an Iraq war veteran featured in his documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11" came as no surprise.

"The only thing about it that might be surprising is it was a decision by three Republican-appointed judges ... and they sided with me," Moore said Thursday. "After 17 years of people disagreeing with me politically and suing me they should get the message. If it is in a film of mine, it is true."

The 1st Circuit Court of Appeals ruled a federal judge was correct to throw out Sgt. Peter Damon's lawsuit against Moore, who used a clip from a television interview without Damon's permission.

The National Guardsman from Middleborough, Mass., alleged he was humiliated and emotionally distressed due to his appearance in Moore's scathing 2004 documentary that criticized the Bush administration and the war in Iraq.

But an appeals court judge said while she can understand Damon's anger, the clip could not reasonably be construed as defamatory.

Judge Aida Delgado-Colon said, "There is no reason to believe that a reasonable member of the military or veteran community would conclude that Damon's appearance in the documentary conveyed a defamatory meaning, and therefore lowered his reputation or subjected him to scorn, hatred, ridicule or contempt in that community."

Two members of the three-judge panel were appointed by President Bush.

"The thing that gets lost in all this is the point that part of the film was making is the soldiers weren't being treated well at Walter Reed hospital," Moore said. "It took the mainstream media until last year to cover this story."