Deterritory

Cockburn

The Fog of Cop-Out



Robert McNamara 10, Errol Morris 0



By ALEXANDER COCKBURN



My dear friend and late Nation colleague Andrew Kopkind liked to tell how, skiing in Aspen at the height of the Vietnam War, he came round a bend and saw another skier, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, alone near the edge of a precipice. This was during the period of Rolling Thunder, which ultimately saw three times as many bombs dropped on Vietnam as the Allies dropped on Europe in the Second World War. I could have reached out with my ski pole, Andy would say wistfully, and pushed him over.



Alas, Andy shirked this chance to get into the history books and McNamara survived the 1960s, when he contributed more than most to the slaughter of 3.4 million Vietnamese (his own estimate). He went on to run the World Bank, where he presided over the impoverishment, eviction from their lands and death of many millions more round the world.



And now here he is, the star of Errol Morris's much-praised, in my view wildly over-praised, documentary The Fog of War, talking comfortably about the millions of people he's helped to kill. It reminded me of films of Albert Speer, Hitler's architect and then head of war production. Speer loved to admit to an overall guilt. But when he was pressed on specific nastiness, like working Jews or Russians to death in arms factories, he would insist, eyes ablaze with forthrightness, that he knew nothing of such infamies.



It's good to have a new generation reminded of history's broad outlines, like the firebombing of Japanese cities and Vietnam, but even here McNamara's recollection--surprising to many--of his role in advising Curtis LeMay to order his bombers to fly at lower altitude, the more effectively to incinerate Japanese cities, goes unexamined.



Did the young McNamara, admittedly a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force, really play such a role? I asked my associate, Rohit Goel, to check, and he contacted Michael Sherry, Professor of History at Northwestern University, author of The Rise of American Air Power. Here's what Sherry e-mailed back:





I did extensive research in the late 1970s and 1980s on the American bombing of Japan, and especially on LeMay's decision to fly in at lower altitudes. I do not recall that McNamara's name ever popped up in those records, and since McNamara's was a famous name by then, I wouldn't have ignored it. Nor was McNamara mentioned in the several hours of interviewing I did with LeMay. While not denigrating his [i.e. McNamara's]wartime record, I suspect there is some latter-day expansion of the importance of his wartime role that not uncommon tendency of old soldiers to inflate the past. In this case, there may also be a familiar theme at work that surfaced, sometimes in ugly conflict, in McNamara's tenure as defense secretary the superiority of civilian expertise over military wisdom; perhaps McNamara is figuratively writing that theme back into his story of World War II... In any event,doubt LeMay saw McNamara as a major figure in his decision-making, and LeMay's resort to firebombing was the product of several factors (including pressure from Washington, and simply the apparent failure of other efforts to do much), not simply of the technical advice he received.





The documentary's gimmickry-cuts to black, Morris shouting his questions away from the mike, McNamara off-center in the frame, montage of typewriter-ribbon wheels, skulls dropping in slow motion down a stairwell, captions offering very banal 'lessons'-gives us a clue.



Morris didn't have much to throw at McNamara. He didn't do enough homework, and it's no substitute to say he's evolved a technique whereby we can look into McNamara's eyes. We can look into the eyes of anyone on remote camera on the Koppel Show. So what?



Time and again, McNamara gets away with it, cowering in the shadow of baroque monsters like Curtis LeMay or LBJ, choking up about his choice of Kennedy's gravesite in Arlington, sniffling at the memory of Johnson giving him the Medal of Freedom, spouting nonsense about how Kennedy would have pulled out of Vietnam, muffling himself in the ever-useful camouflage of the 'fog of war.'



Now, the 'fog of war' is a tag usually attributed to von Clausewitz, though the great German philosopher and theorist of war never actually used the phrase. Eugenia Kiesling argued a couple of years ago in Military Review that the idea of fog-- unreliable information--wasn't a central preoccupation of Clausewitz. 'Eliminating fog', Kiesling wrote, gives us a clearer and more useful understanding of Clausewitz's friction. It restores uncertainty and the intangible stresses of military command to their rightful centrality in 'On War'. It allows us to replace the simplistic message that war intelligence is important with the reminder that Clausewitz constantly emphasizes moral forces in war.'



As presented by McNamara, through Morris, 'the fog of war' usefully deflects attention from clear and unpleasant facts entirely unobscured by fog. McNamara can talk--I'll come to the Gulf of Tonkin incident shortly--about confusions, fog, about what actually happened on August 2 or 4, 1964, thus detouring unfogged daylight, of which there was plenty, about the moral failures of US commanders including McNamara, waging war on the Vietnamese.



Roberta Wohlstetter was a pioneer in this fogging technique back in the 1950s with her heavily subsidized Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, which deployed the idea of distracting 'noise' as the phenomenon that prevented US commanders, ultimately Roosevelt, from comprehending the information that the Japasnese were about to launch a surprise attack. Wohlstetterian 'noise' thus obscured the fact that FDR wanted a Japanese provocation, knew the attack was coming, though not probable not its scale and destructiveness.



When McNamara looks back down memory lane there are no real shadows, just the sunlight of moral self-satisfaction: 'I don't fault Truman for dropping the bomb'; 'I never saw Kennedy more shocked' (after the murder of Ngo Dinh Diem); 'never would I have authorized an illegal action' (after the Tonkin Gulf fakery); 'I'm very proud of my accomplishments and I'm very sorry I made errors' (his life).



Slabs of instructive history are missing from Morris's film. McNamara rode into the Pentagon on one of the biggest of big lies, the bogus 'missile gap' touted by Kennedy in his 1960 campaign against Nixon. It was all nonsense. As Defense Secretary McNamara ordered the production of 1,000 Minuteman strategic nukes, this at a time when he was looking at US intelligence reports showing that the Soviets had one silo with one untested missile.



To Morris now he offers homilies about the menace of nuclear Armageddon. It's cost-free to say to say such things, grazing peacefully on the tranquil mountain pastures of his 87 years.



Why did Morris not try to extort from McNamara, in those twenty-three hoursd of interviews, some reflections on how people in their forties, on active service in the belly of the beast, should behave. Would McNamara encourage today's weapons designers in Los Alamos to mutiny, to resign? Were the atom spies in Los Alamos in the 1940s right to try to level nuclear terror to some sort of balance? How does McNamara regard the Berrigans and their comrades who served or are serving decades in prison for physically attacking nuclear missiles, beating the decks of the Sea Wolf nuclear submarine with their hammers.



Even when McNamara's record shows to his credit, no useful point is made. Ralph Nader tells me (and wrote it in Unsafe at Any Speed) that it's true that when he was head of the Ford Division of the Ford motor Company in the mid-1950s, McNamara did push for safety options--seat belts and padded instrument panels. Ford dealer brochures for the '56 models featured photos of how Ford and GM models fared in actual crashes, to GM's disadvantage.



But Morris could have put to McNamara what happened next. As Nader describes it, in December, 1955, a top GM executive called Ford's vice president for sales and said Ford's safety campaign had to stop. These Ford executives, many of them formerly from GM, had a saying, Chevy could drop its price $25 to bankrupt Chrysler, $50 to bankrupt Ford. Ford ran up the white flag. The safety sales campaign stopped. McNamara took a long vacation in Florida, his career in Detroit in the balance, and came back a team player. Safety went through the windscreen and lay in a coma for years.



None of this bloody corporate handiwork shows up in the documentary, which opts for that showy footage of skulls being dropped down stair wells as part of safety-impact studies. McNamara invokes the Ford Falcon--you can still see some of them bumbling around in the South--as his effort to push small cheap cars, and of course this claim goes unexamined too. The US car companies put out small cars in the late fifties mostly to instruct US consumers that small cars weren't worth buying (except for the immortal Slant 6 Plymouth Valiant, rolled out in 1960 by Chrysler, run by engineers), as opposed to the larger vehicles which was what the companies were interested in making money off. The Japanese and Germans came in with well-made small cars and, helped by Nader's attack on the Corvair (which was actually a pretty good car) captured that market, just as they wiped out the UK's poorly managed MG and Triumph in the Forties.



The eyes don't tell the story. McNamara is self-serving and disingenuous. Reminiscing about his acceptance of Kennedy's invitation to come from Ford in Detroit to Camelot, McNamara claims to Morris that he insisted he would not be part of Georgetown's pesky social round. Nonsense. He took to it like a parvenu to ermine, as more than one Washington hostess could glowingly recall.



'It's beyond the capacity of the human mind to comprehend all the variables,' the systems analyst proclaims to Morris, which would have afforded a better-informed filmmaker a chance to ask this cold engine of statistical calculation for his take on the prime business of the Pentagon, the allocation of pork.



Why did Defense Secretary McNamara overrule all expert review and procurement recommendations and insist that General Dynamics rather than Boeing make the disastrous F-111, at that time one of the largest procurement contracts uin the Pentagon's history? Could it be that Henry Crown of Chicago was calling in some chits for his role in fixing the 1960 JFK vote in Cook County, Illinois? Crown, of Chicago Sand and Gravel, had $300 million of the mob's money in GD debentures, and after the disaster of the Convair, GD needed the F-111 to avoid going belly-up, taking the mob's $300 million with it. McNamara misled Congressional investigators about this for years afterward.



The Gulf of Tonkin 'attack' prompted the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964, whereby Congress gave LBJ legal authority to prosecute and escalate the war in Vietnam. McNamara does some fancy footwork here, stating that there wasn't any attack by North Vietnamese PT boats on the US destroyer Maddox on August 4, but that there had been such an attack on August 2. It shouldn't have been beyond Morris's powers to pull up a well-reported piece by Robert Scheer, published in the Los Angeles Times in April, 1985, establishing not only that the Maddox was attacked neither on August 2 nor 4 but that, beginning on the night of July 30, South Vietnamese navy personnel, US-trained and -equipped, 'had begun conducting secret raids on targets in North Vietnam.' As Scheer said, the North Vietnamese PT boats that approached the Maddox on August 2 were probably responding to that assault.



The Six-Day War? Just before this '67 war the Israelis were ready to attack and knew they were going to win but couldn't get a clear go-ahead from the Johnson Administration. As the BBC documentary The 50 Years War narrates, Meir Amit, head of Israel's Mossad, flew to Washington. The crucial OK came from McNamara, thus launching Israel's long-planned, aggressive war on Egypt, Jordan and Syria, which led to present disasters. And no, Morris didn't quiz McNamara on Israel's deliberate attack on the US ship Liberty during that war (with thirty-four US sailors dead and 174 wounded), or on the cover-up that McNamara supervised.



We have so many sponsors of mass murder hanging around, it would be nice to see one of them, once in a while, take a real pasting. But no, they live on into happy old age, vivid in their worries about the human condition, writing in The New York Review of Books, passing on no honest records about the evil it really takes to run an empire. So suddenly people are shocked about a relative piker like George W. Bush and start talking about Hitler. If only they knew. It's not that hard to find out.



As displayed by Morris, McNamara never offers any reflection on the social system that produced and promoted him, a perfectly nice, well-spoken war criminal. As his inflation of his role in the foe-bombing of Japan shows, he can go so far as to falsely though complacently indict himself , while still shirking bigger , more terrifying and certainly more useful reflections on the system that blessed him and mercilessly killed millions upon millions under FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, Nixon. I don't think Morris laid a glove on McNamara, who should be feeling well pleased. Like Speer, he got away with it yet again

Toward an Ethics of Curbing an Appetite

The Girls Next Door

By PETER LANDESMAN

Published: January 25, 2004


The house at 1212 1/2 West Front Street in Plainfield, N.J., is a conventional midcentury home with slate-gray siding, white trim and Victorian lines. When I stood in front of it on a breezy day in October, I could hear the cries of children from the playground of an elementary school around the corner. American flags fluttered from porches and windows. The neighborhood is a leafy, middle-class Anytown. The house is set back off the street, near two convenience stores and a gift shop. On the door of Superior Supermarket was pasted a sign issued by the Plainfield police: ''Safe neighborhoods save lives.'' The store's manager, who refused to tell me his name, said he never noticed anything unusual about the house, and never heard anything. But David Miranda, the young man behind the counter of Westside Convenience, told me he saw girls from the house roughly once a week. ''They came in to buy candy and soda, then went back to the house,'' he said. The same girls rarely came twice, and they were all very young, Miranda said. They never asked for anything beyond what they were purchasing; they certainly never asked for help. Cars drove up to the house all day; nice cars, all kinds of cars. Dozens of men came and went. ''But no one here knew what was really going on,'' Miranda said. And no one ever asked.

On a tip, the Plainfield police raided the house in February 2002, expecting to find illegal aliens working an underground brothel. What the police found were four girls between the ages of 14 and 17. They were all Mexican nationals without documentation. But they weren't prostitutes; they were sex slaves. The distinction is important: these girls weren't working for profit or a paycheck. They were captives to the traffickers and keepers who controlled their every move. ''I consider myself hardened,'' Mark J. Kelly, now a special agent with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (the largest investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security), told me recently. ''I spent time in the Marine Corps. But seeing some of the stuff I saw, then heard about, from those girls was a difficult, eye-opening experience.''

The police found a squalid, land-based equivalent of a 19th-century slave ship, with rancid, doorless bathrooms; bare, putrid mattresses; and a stash of penicillin, ''morning after'' pills and misoprostol, an antiulcer medication that can induce abortion. The girls were pale, exhausted and malnourished.

It turned out that 1212 1/2 West Front Street was one of what law-enforcement officials say are dozens of active stash houses and apartments in the New York metropolitan area -- mirroring hundreds more in other major cities like Los Angeles, Atlanta and Chicago -- where under-age girls and young women from dozens of countries are trafficked and held captive. Most of them -- whether they started out in Eastern Europe or Latin America -- are taken to the United States through Mexico. Some of them have been baited by promises of legitimate jobs and a better life in America; many have been abducted; others have been bought from or abandoned by their impoverished families.

Because of the porousness of the U.S.-Mexico border and the criminal networks that traverse it, the towns and cities along that border have become the main staging area in an illicit and barbaric industry, whose ''products'' are women and girls. On both sides of the border, they are rented out for sex for as little as 15 minutes at a time, dozens of times a day. Sometimes they are sold outright to other traffickers and sex rings, victims and experts say. These sex slaves earn no money, there is nothing voluntary about what they do and if they try to escape they are often beaten and sometimes killed.

Last September, in a speech before the United Nations General Assembly, President Bush named sex trafficking as ''a special evil,'' a multibillion-dollar ''underground of brutality and lonely fear,'' a global scourge alongside the AIDS epidemic. Influenced by a coalition of religious organizations, the Bush administration has pushed international action on the global sex trade. The president declared at the U.N. that ''those who create these victims and profit from their suffering must be severely punished'' and that ''those who patronize this industry debase themselves and deepen the misery of others. And governments that tolerate this trade are tolerating a form of slavery.''

Under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 -- the first U.S. law to recognize that people trafficked against their will are victims of a crime, not illegal aliens -- the U.S. government rates other countries' records on human trafficking and can apply economic sanctions on those that aren't making efforts to improve them. Another piece of legislation, the Protect Act, which Bush signed into law last year, makes it a crime for any person to enter the U.S., or for any citizen to travel abroad, for the purpose of sex tourism involving children. The sentences are severe: up to 30 years' imprisonment for each offense.

The thrust of the president's U.N. speech and the scope of the laws passed here to address the sex-trafficking epidemic might suggest that this is a global problem but not particularly an American one. In reality, little has been done to document sex trafficking in this country. In dozens of interviews I conducted with former sex slaves, madams, government and law-enforcement officials and anti-sex-trade activists for more than four months in Eastern Europe, Mexico and the United States, the details and breadth of this sordid trade in the U.S. came to light.

In fact, the United States has become a major importer of sex slaves. Last year, the C.I.A. estimated that between 18,000 and 20,000 people are trafficked annually into the United States. The government has not studied how many of these are victims of sex traffickers, but Kevin Bales, president of Free the Slaves, America's largest anti-slavery organization, says that the number is at least 10,000 a year. John Miller, the State Department's director of the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, conceded: ''That figure could be low. What we know is that the number is huge.'' Bales estimates that there are 30,000 to 50,000 sex slaves in captivity in the United States at any given time. Laura Lederer, a senior State Department adviser on trafficking, told me, ''We're not finding victims in the United States because we're not looking for them.''

ABDUCTION

In Eastern European capitals like Kiev and Moscow, dozens of sex-trafficking rings advertise nanny positions in the United States in local newspapers; others claim to be scouting for models and actresses. In Chisinau, the capital of the former Soviet republic of Moldova -- the poorest country in Europe and the one experts say is most heavily culled by traffickers for young women -- I saw a billboard with a fresh-faced, smiling young woman beckoning girls to waitress positions in Paris. But of course there are no waitress positions and no ''Paris.'' Some of these young women are actually tricked into paying their own travel expenses -- typically around $3,000 -- as a down payment on what they expect to be bright, prosperous futures, only to find themselves kept prisoner in Mexico before being moved to the United States and sold into sexual bondage there.

The Eastern European trafficking operations, from entrapment to transport, tend to be well-oiled monoethnic machines. One notorious Ukrainian ring, which has since been broken up, was run by Tetyana Komisaruk and Serge Mezheritsky. One of their last transactions, according to Daniel Saunders, an assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, took place in late June 2000 at the Hard Rock Cafe in Tijuana. Around dinnertime, a buyer named Gordey Vinitsky walked in. He was followed shortly after by Komisaruk's husband, Valery, who led Vinitsky out to the parking lot and to a waiting van. Inside the van were six Ukrainian women in their late teens and early 20's. They had been promised jobs as models and baby sitters in the glamorous United States, and they probably had no idea why they were sitting in a van in a backwater like Tijuana in the early evening. Vinitsky pointed into the van at two of the women and said he'd take them for $10,000 each. Valery drove the young women to a gated villa 20 minutes away in Rosarito, a Mexican honky-tonk tourist trap in Baja California. They were kept there until July 4, when they were delivered to San Diego by boat and distributed to their buyers, including Vinitsky, who claimed his two ''purchases.'' The Komisaruks, Mezheritsky and Vinitsky were caught in May 2001 and are serving long sentences in U.S. federal prison.

In October, I met Nicole, a young Russian woman who had been trafficked into Mexico by a different network. ''I wanted to get out of Moscow, and they told me the Mexican border was like a freeway,'' said Nicole, who is now 25. We were sitting at a cafe on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, and she was telling me the story of her narrow escape from sex slavery -- she was taken by immigration officers when her traffickers were trying to smuggle her over the border from Tijuana. She still seemed fearful of being discovered by the trafficking ring and didn't want even her initials to appear in print. (Nicole is a name she adopted after coming to the U.S.)

Two years ago, afraid for her life after her boyfriend was gunned down in Moscow in an organized-crime-related shootout, she found herself across a cafe table in Moscow from a man named Alex, who explained how he could save her by smuggling her into the U.S. Once she agreed, Nicole said, Alex told her that if she didn't show up at the airport, '''I'll find you and cut your head off.' Russians do not play around. In Moscow you can get a bullet in your head just for fun.''

Donna M. Hughes, a professor of women's studies at the University of Rhode Island and an expert on sex trafficking, says that prostitution barely existed 12 years ago in the Soviet Union. ''It was suppressed by political structures. All the women had jobs.'' But in the first years after the collapse of Soviet Communism, poverty in the former Soviet states soared. Young women -- many of them college-educated and married -- became easy believers in Hollywood-generated images of swaying palm trees in L.A. ''A few of them have an idea that prostitution might be involved,'' Hughes says. ''But their idea of prostitution is 'Pretty Woman,' which is one of the most popular films in Ukraine and Russia. They're thinking, This may not be so bad.''

The girls' first contacts are usually with what appear to be legitimate travel agencies. According to prosecutors, the Komisaruk/Mezheritsky ring in Ukraine worked with two such agencies in Kiev, Art Life International and Svit Tours. The helpful agents at Svit and Art Life explained to the girls that the best way to get into the U.S. was through Mexico, which they portrayed as a short walk or boat ride from the American dream. Oblivious and full of hope, the girls get on planes to Europe and then on to Mexico.

Every day, flights from Paris, London and Amsterdam arrive at Mexico City's international airport carrying groups of these girls, sometimes as many as seven at a time, according to two Mexico City immigration officers I spoke with (and who asked to remain anonymous). One of them told me that officials at the airport -- who cooperate with Mexico's federal preventive police (P.F.P.) -- work with the traffickers and ''direct airlines to park at certain gates. Officials go to the aircraft. They know the seat numbers. While passengers come off, they take the girls to an office, where officials will 'process' them.''

Magdalena Carral, Mexico's commissioner of the National Institute of Migration, the government agency that controls migration issues at all airports, seaports and land entries into Mexico, told me: ''Everything happens at the airport. We are giving a big fight to have better control of the airport. Corruption does not leave tracks, and sometimes we cannot track it. Six months ago we changed the three main officials at the airport. But it's a daily fight. These networks are very powerful and dangerous.''


But Mexico is not merely a way station en route to the U.S. for third-country traffickers, like the Eastern European rings. It is also a vast source of even younger and more cheaply acquired girls for sexual servitude in the United States. While European traffickers tend to dupe their victims into boarding one-way flights to Mexico to their own captivity, Mexican traffickers rely on the charm and brute force of ''Los Lenones,'' tightly organized associations of pimps, according to Roberto Caballero, an officer with the P.F.P. Although hundreds of ''popcorn traffickers'' -- individuals who take control of one or two girls -- work the margins, Caballero said, at least 15 major trafficking organizations and 120 associated factions tracked by the P.F.P. operate as wholesalers: collecting human merchandise and taking orders from safe houses and brothels in the major sex-trafficking hubs in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Chicago.

Like the Sicilian Mafia, Los Lenones are based on family hierarchies, Caballero explained. The father controls the organization and the money, while the sons and their male cousins hunt, kidnap and entrap victims. The boys leave school at 12 and are given one or two girls their age to rape and pimp out to begin their training, which emphasizes the arts of kidnapping and seduction. Throughout the rural and suburban towns from southern Mexico to the U.S. border, along what traffickers call the Via Lactea, or Milky Way, the agents of Los Lenones troll the bus stations and factories and school dances where under-age girls gather, work and socialize. They first ply the girls like prospective lovers, buying them meals and desserts, promising affection and then marriage. Then the men describe rumors they've heard about America, about the promise of jobs and schools. Sometimes the girls are easy prey. Most of them already dream of El Norte. But the theater often ends as soon as the agent has the girl alone, when he beats her, drugs her or simply forces her into a waiting car.

The majority of Los Lenones -- 80 percent of them, Caballero says -- are based in Tenancingo, a charmless suburb an hour's drive south of Mexico City. Before I left Mexico City for Tenancingo in October, I was warned by Mexican and U.S. officials that the traffickers there are protected by the local police, and that the town is designed to discourage outsiders, with mazelike streets and only two closely watched entrances. The last time the federal police went there to investigate the disappearance of a local girl, their vehicle was surrounded, and the officers were intimidated into leaving. I traveled in a bulletproof Suburban with well-armed federales and an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent.

On the way, we stopped at a gas station, where I met the parents of a girl from Tenancingo who was reportedly abducted in August 2000. The girl, Suri, is now 20. Her mother told me that there were witnesses who saw her being forced into a car on the way home from work at a local factory. No one called the police. Suri's mother recited the names of daughters of a number of her friends who have also been taken: ''Minerva, Sylvia, Carmen,'' she said in a monotone, as if the list went on and on.

Just two days earlier, her parents heard from Suri (they call her by her nickname) for the first time since she disappeared. ''She's in Queens, New York,'' the mother told me breathlessly. ''She said she was being kept in a house watched by Colombians. She said they take her by car every day to work in a brothel. I was crying on the phone, 'When are you coming back, when are you coming back?' '' The mother looked at me helplessly; the father stared blankly into the distance. Then the mother sobered. ''My daughter said: 'I'm too far away. I don't know when I'm coming back.''' Before she hung up, Suri told her mother: ''Don't cry. I'll escape soon. And don't talk to anyone.''

Sex-trafficking victims widely believe that if they talk, they or someone they love will be killed. And their fear is not unfounded, since the tentacles of the trafficking rings reach back into the girls' hometowns, and local law enforcement is often complicit in the sex trade.

One officer in the P.F.P.'s anti-trafficking division told me that 10 high-level officials in the state of Sonora share a $200,000 weekly payoff from traffickers, a gargantuan sum of money for Mexico. The officer told me with a frozen smile that he was powerless to do anything about it.

''Some officials are not only on the organization's payroll, they are key players in the organization,'' an official at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City told me. ''Corruption is the most important reason these networks are so successful.''

Nicolas Suarez, the P.F.P.'s coordinator of intelligence, sounded fatalistic about corruption when I spoke to him in Mexico City in September. ''We have that cancer, corruption,'' he told me with a shrug. ''But it exists in every country. In every house there is a devil.''

The U.S. Embassy official told me: ''Mexican officials see sex trafficking as a U.S. problem. If there wasn't such a large demand, then people -- trafficking victims and migrants alike -- wouldn't be going up there.''

When I asked Magdalena Carral, the Mexican commissioner of migration, about these accusations, she said that she didn't know anything about Los Lenones or sex trafficking in Tenancingo. But she conceded: ''There is an investigation against some officials accused of cooperating with these trafficking networks nationwide. Sonora is one of those places.'' She added, ''We are determined not to allow any kind of corruption in this administration, not the smallest kind.''

Gary Haugen, president of the International Justice Mission, an organization based in Arlington, Va., that fights sexual exploitation in South Asia and Southeast Asia, says: ''Sex trafficking isn't a poverty issue but a law-enforcement issue. You can only carry out this trade at significant levels with the cooperation of local law enforcement. In the developing world the police are not seen as a solution for anything. You don't run to the police; you run from the police.''

BREAKING THE GIRLS IN

Once the Mexican traffickers abduct or seduce the women and young girls, it's not other men who first indoctrinate them into sexual slavery but other women. The victims and officials I spoke to all emphasized this fact as crucial to the trafficking rings' success. ''Women are the principals,'' Caballero, the Mexican federal preventive police officer, told me. ''The victims are put under the influence of the mothers, who handle them and beat them. Then they give the girls to the men to beat and rape into submission.'' Traffickers understand that because women can more easily gain the trust of young girls, they can more easily crush them. ''Men are the customers and controllers, but within most trafficking organizations themselves, women are the operators,'' Haugen says. ''Women are the ones who exert violent force and psychological torture.''

This mirrors the tactics of the Eastern European rings. ''Mexican pimps have learned a lot from European traffickers,'' said Claudia, a former prostitute and madam in her late 40's, whom I met in Tepito, Mexico City's vast and lethal ghetto. ''The Europeans not only gather girls but put older women in the same houses,'' she told me. ''They get younger and older women emotionally attached. They're transported together, survive together.''

The traffickers' harvest is innocence. Before young women and girls are taken to the United States, their captors want to obliterate their sexual inexperience while preserving its appearance. For the Eastern European girls, this ''preparation'' generally happens in Ensenada, a seaside tourist town in Baja California, a region in Mexico settled by Russian immigrants, or Tijuana, where Nicole, the Russian woman I met in Los Angeles, was taken along with four other girls when she arrived in Mexico. The young women are typically kept in locked-down, gated villas in groups of 16 to 20. The girls are provided with all-American clothing -- Levi's and baseball caps. They learn to say, ''U.S. citizen.'' They are also sexually brutalized. Nicole told me that the day she arrived in Tijuana, three of her traveling companions were ''tried out'' locally. The education lasts for days and sometimes weeks.

For the Mexican girls abducted by Los Lenones, the process of breaking them in often begins on Calle Santo Tomas, a filthy narrow street in La Merced, a dangerous and raucous ghetto in Mexico City. Santo Tomas has been a place for low-end prostitution since before Spain's conquest of Mexico in the 16th century. But beginning in the early 90's, it became an important training ground for under-age girls and young women on their way into sexual bondage in the United States. When I first visited Santo Tomas, in late September, I found 150 young women walking a slow-motion parabola among 300 or 400 men. It was a balmy night, and the air was heavy with the smell of barbecue and gasoline. Two dead dogs were splayed over the curb just beyond where the girls struck casual poses in stilettos and spray-on-tight neon vinyl and satin or skimpy leopard-patterned outfits. Some of the girls looked as young as 12. Their faces betrayed no emotion. Many wore pendants of the grim reaper around their necks and made hissing sounds; this, I was told, was part of a ritual to ward off bad energy. The men, who were there to rent or just gaze, didn't speak. From the tables of a shabby cafe midblock, other men -- also Mexicans, but more neatly dressed -- sat scrutinizing the girls as at an auction. These were buyers and renters with an interest in the youngest and best looking. They nodded to the girls they wanted and then followed them past a guard in a Yankees baseball cap through a tin doorway.

Inside, the girls braced the men before a statue of St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, and patted them down for weapons. Then the girls genuflected to the stone-faced saint and led the men to the back, grabbing a condom and roll of toilet paper on the way. They pointed to a block of ice in a tub in lieu of a urinal. Beyond a blue hallway the air went sour, like old onions; there were 30 stalls curtained off by blue fabric, every one in use. Fifteen minutes of straightforward intercourse with the girl's clothes left on cost 50 pesos, or about $4.50. For $4.50 more, the dress was lifted. For another $4.50, the bra would be taken off. Oral sex was $4.50; ''acrobatic positions'' were $1.80 each. Despite the dozens of people and the various exertions in this room, there were only the sounds of zippers and shoes. There was no human noise at all.

Most of the girls on Santo Tomas would have sex with 20 to 30 men a day; they would do this seven days a week usually for weeks but sometimes for months before they were ''ready'' for the United States. If they refused, they would be beaten and sometimes killed. They would be told that if they tried to escape, one of their family members, who usually had no idea where they were, would be beaten or killed. Working at the brutalizing pace of 20 men per day, a girl could earn her captors as much as $2,000 a week. In the U.S., that same girl could bring in perhaps $30,000 per week.

In Europe, girls and women trafficked for the sex trade gain in value the closer they get to their destinations. According to Iana Matei, who operates Reaching Out, a Romanian rescue organization, a Romanian or Moldovan girl can be sold to her first transporter -- who she may or may not know has taken her captive -- for as little as $60, then for $500 to the next. Eventually she can be sold for $2,500 to the organization that will ultimately control and rent her for sex for tens of thousands of dollars a week. (Though the Moldovan and Romanian organizations typically smuggle girls to Western Europe and not the United States, they are, Matei says, closely allied with Russian and Ukrainian networks that do.)

Jonathan M. Winer, deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement in the Clinton administration, says, ''The girls are worth a penny or a ruble in their home village, and suddenly they're worth hundreds and thousands somewhere else.''

CROSSING THE BORDER

In November, I followed by helicopter the 12-foot-high sheet-metal fence that represents the U.S.-Mexico boundary from Imperial Beach, Calif., south of San Diego, 14 miles across the gritty warrens and havoc of Tijuana into the barren hills of Tecate. The fence drops off abruptly at Colonia Nido de las Aguilas, a dry riverbed that straddles the border. Four hundred square miles of bone-dry, barren hills stretch out on the U.S. side. I hovered over the end of the fence with Lester McDaniel, a special agent with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. On the U.S. side, ''J-e-s-u-s'' was spelled out in rocks 10 feet high across a steep hillside. A 15-foot white wooden cross rose from the peak. It is here that thousands of girls and young women -- most of them Mexican and many of them straight from Calle Santo Tomas -- are taken every year, mostly between January and August, the dry season. Coyotes -- or smugglers -- subcontracted exclusively by sex traffickers sometimes trudge the girls up to the cross and let them pray, then herd them into the hills northward.

A few miles east, we picked up a deeply grooved trail at the fence and followed it for miles into the hills until it plunged into a deep isolated ravine called Cottonwood Canyon. A Ukrainian sex-trafficking ring force-marches young women through here, McDaniel told me. In high heels and seductive clothing, the young women trek 12 miles to Highway 94, where panel trucks sit waiting. McDaniel listed the perils: rattlesnakes, dehydration and hypothermia. He failed to mention the traffickers' bullets should the women try to escape.

''If a girl tries to run, she's killed and becomes just one more woman in the desert,'' says Marisa B. Ugarte, director of the Bilateral Safety Corridor Coalition, a San Diego organization that coordinates rescue efforts for trafficking victims on both sides of the border. ''But if she keeps going north, she reaches the Gates of Hell.''

One girl who was trafficked back and forth across that border repeatedly was Andrea. ''Andrea'' is just one name she was given by her traffickers and clients; she doesn't know her real name. She was born in the United States and sold or abandoned here -- at about 4 years old, she says -- by a woman who may have been her mother. (She is now in her early to mid-20's; she doesn't know for sure.) She says that she spent approximately the next 12 years as the captive of a sex-trafficking ring that operated on both sides of the Mexican border. Because of the threat of retribution from her former captors, who are believed to be still at large, an organization that rescues and counsels trafficking victims and former prostitutes arranged for me to meet Andrea in October at a secret location in the United States.

In a series of excruciating conversations, Andrea explained to me how the trafficking ring that kept her worked, moving young girls (and boys too) back and forth over the border, selling nights and weekends with them mostly to American men. She said that the ring imported -- both through abduction and outright purchase -- toddlers, children and teenagers into the U.S. from many countries.

''The border is very busy, lots of stuff moving back and forth,'' she said. ''Say you needed to get some kids. This guy would offer a woman a lot of money, and she'd take birth certificates from the U.S. -- from Puerto Rican children or darker-skinned children -- and then she would go into Mexico through Tijuana. Then she'd drive to Juarez'' -- across the Mexican border from El Paso, Tex. -- ''and then they'd go shopping. I was taken with them once. We went to this house that had a goat in the front yard and came out with a 4-year-old boy.'' She remembers the boy costing around $500 (she said that many poor parents were told that their children would go to adoption agencies and on to better lives in America). ''When we crossed the border at Juarez, all the border guards wanted to see was a birth certificate for the dark-skinned kids.''

Andrea continued: ''There would be a truck waiting for us at the Mexico border, and those trucks you don't want to ride in. Those trucks are closed. They had spots where there would be transfers, the rest stops and truck stops on the freeways in the U.S. One person would walk you into the bathroom, and then another person would take you out of the bathroom and take you to a different vehicle.''

Andrea told me she was transported to Juarez dozens of times. During one visit, when she was about 7 years old, the trafficker took her to the Radisson Casa Grande Hotel, where there was a john waiting in a room. The john was an older American man, and he read Bible passages to her before and after having sex with her. Andrea described other rooms she remembered in other hotels in Mexico: the Howard Johnson in Leon, the Crowne Plaza in Guadalajara. She remembers most of all the ceiling patterns. ''When I was taken to Mexico, I knew things were going to be different,'' she said. The ''customers'' were American businessmen. ''The men who went there had higher positions, had more to lose if they were caught doing these things on the other side of the border. I was told my purpose was to keep these men from abusing their own kids.'' Later she told me: ''The white kids you could beat but you couldn't mark. But with Mexican kids you could do whatever you wanted. They're untraceable. You lose nothing by killing them.''

Then she and the other children and teenagers in this cell were walked back across the border to El Paso by the traffickers. ''The border guards talked to you like, 'Did you have fun in Mexico?' And you answered exactly what you were told, 'Yeah, I had fun.' 'Runners' moved the harder-to-place kids, the darker or not-quite-as-well-behaved kids, kids that hadn't been broken yet.''

Another trafficking victim I met, a young woman named Montserrat, was taken to the United States from Veracruz, Mexico, six years ago, at age 13. (Montserrat is her nickname.) ''I was going to work in America,'' she told me. ''I wanted to go to school there, have an apartment and a red Mercedes Benz.'' Montserrat's trafficker, who called himself Alejandro, took her to Sonora, across the Mexican border from Douglas, Ariz., where she joined a group of a dozen other teenage girls, all with the same dream of a better life. They were from Chiapas, Guatemala, Oaxaca -- everywhere, she said.

The group was marched 12 hours through the desert, just a few of the thousands of Mexicans who bolted for America that night along the 2,000 miles of border. Cars were waiting at a fixed spot on the other side. Alejandro directed her to a Nissan and drove her and a few others to a house she said she thought was in Phoenix, the home of a white American family. ''It looked like America,'' she told me. ''I ate chicken. The family ignored me, watched TV. I thought the worst part was behind me.''

IN THE UNITED STATES: HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT

A week after Montserrat was taken across the border, she said, she and half a dozen other girls were loaded into a windowless van. ''Alejandro dropped off girls at gas stations as we drove, wherever there were minimarkets,'' Montserrat told me. At each drop-off there was somebody waiting. Sometimes a girl would be escorted to the bathroom, never to return to the van. They drove 24 hours a day. ''As the girls were leaving, being let out the back, all of them 14 or 15 years old, I felt confident,'' Montserrat said. We were talking in Mexico City, where she has been since she escaped from her trafficker four years ago. She's now 19, and shy with her body but direct with her gaze, which is flat and unemotional. ''I didn't know the real reason they were disappearing,'' she said. ''They were going to a better life.''

Eventually, only Montserrat and one other girl remained. Outside, the air had turned frigid, and there was snow on the ground. It was night when the van stopped at a gas station. A man was waiting. Montserrat's friend hopped out the back, gleeful. ''She said goodbye, I'll see you tomorrow,'' Montserrat recalled. ''I never saw her again.''

After leaving the gas station, Alejandro drove Montserrat to an apartment. A couple of weeks later he took her to a Dollarstore. ''He bought me makeup,'' Montserrat told me. ''He chose a short dress and a halter top, both black. I asked him why the clothes. He said it was for a party the owner of the apartment was having. He bought me underwear. Then I started to worry.'' When they arrived at the apartment, Alejandro left, saying he was coming back. But another man appeared at the door. ''The man said he'd already paid and I had to do whatever he said,'' Montserrat said. ''When he said he already paid, I knew why I was there. I was crushed.''




Montserrat said that she didn't leave that apartment for the next three months, then for nine months after that, Alejandro regularly took her in and out of the apartment for appointments with various johns.

Sex trafficking is one of the few human rights violations that rely on exposure: victims have to be available, displayed, delivered and returned. Girls were shuttled in open cars between the Plainfield, N.J., stash house and other locations in northern New Jersey like Elizabeth and Union City. Suri told her mother that she was being driven in a black town car -- just one of hundreds of black town cars traversing New York City at any time -- from her stash house in Queens to places where she was forced to have sex. A Russian ring drove women between various Brooklyn apartments and strip clubs in New Jersey. Andrea named trading hubs at highway rest stops in Deming, N.M.; Kingman, Ariz.; Boulder City, Nev.; and Glendale, Calif. Glendale, Andrea said, was a fork in the road; from there, vehicles went either north to San Jose or south toward San Diego. The traffickers drugged them for travel, she said. ''When they fed you, you started falling asleep.''

In the past several months, I have visited a number of addresses where trafficked girls and young women have reportedly ended up: besides the house in Plainfield, N.J., there is a row house on 51st Avenue in the Corona section of Queens, which has been identified to Mexican federal preventive police by escaped trafficking victims. There is the apartment at Barrington Plaza in the tony Westwood section of Los Angeles, one place that some of the Komisaruk/Mezheritsky ring's trafficking victims ended up, according to Daniel Saunders, the assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted the ring. And there's a house on Massachusetts Avenue in Vista, Calif., a San Diego suburb, which was pointed out to me by a San Diego sheriff. These places all have at least one thing in common: they are camouflaged by their normal, middle-class surroundings.

''This is not narco-traffic secrecy,'' says Sharon B. Cohn, director of anti-trafficking operations for the International Justice Mission. ''These are not people kidnapped and held for ransom, but women and children sold every single day. If they're hidden, their keepers don't make money.''

I.J.M.'s president, Gary Haugen, says: ''It's the easiest kind of crime in the world to spot. Men look for it all day, every day.''

But border agents and local policemen usually don't know trafficking when they see it. The operating assumption among American police departments is that women who sell their bodies do so by choice, and undocumented foreign women who sell their bodies are not only prostitutes (that is, voluntary sex workers) but also trespassers on U.S. soil. No Department of Justice attorney or police vice squad officer I spoke with in Los Angeles -- one of the country's busiest thoroughfares for forced sex traffic -- considers sex trafficking in the U.S. a serious problem, or a priority. A teenage girl arrested on Sunset Strip for solicitation, or a group of Russian sex workers arrested in a brothel raid in the San Fernando Valley, are automatically heaped onto a pile of workaday vice arrests.

The U.S. now offers 5,000 visas a year to trafficking victims to allow them to apply for residency. And there's faint hope among sex-trafficking experts that the Bush administration's recent proposal on Mexican immigration, if enacted, could have some positive effect on sex traffic into the U.S., by sheltering potential witnesses. ''If illegal immigrants who have information about victims have a chance at legal status in this country, they might feel secure enough to come forward,'' says John Miller of the State Department. But ambiguities still dominate on the front lines -- the borders and the streets of urban America -- where sex trafficking will always look a lot like prostitution.

''It's not a particularly complicated thing,'' says Sharon Cohn of International Justice Mission. ''Sex trafficking gets thrown into issues of intimacy and vice, but it's a major crime. It's purely profit and pleasure, and greed and lust, and it's right under homicide.''

IMPRISONMENT AND SUBMISSION

The basement, Andrea said, held as many as 16 children and teenagers of different ethnicities. She remembers that it was underneath a house in an upper-middle-class neighborhood on the West Coast. Throughout much of her captivity, this basement was where she was kept when she wasn't working. ''There was lots of scrawling on the walls,'' she said. ''The other kids drew stick figures, daisies, teddy bears. This Mexican boy would draw a house with sunshine. We each had a mat.''

Andrea paused. ''But nothing happens to you in the basement,'' she continued. ''You just had to worry about when the door opened.''

She explained: ''They would call you out of the basement, and you'd get a bath and you'd get a dress, and if your dress was yellow you were probably going to Disneyland.'' She said they used color coding to make transactions safer for the traffickers and the clients. ''At Disneyland there would be people doing drop-offs and pickups for kids. It's a big open area full of kids, and nobody pays attention to nobody. They would kind of quietly say, 'Go over to that person,' and you would just slip your hand into theirs and say, 'I was looking for you, Daddy.' Then that person would move off with one or two or three of us.''

Her account reminded me -- painfully -- of the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. In the story, a piper shows up and asks for 1,000 guilders for ridding the town of a plague of rats. Playing his pipe, he lures all the rats into the River Weser, where they drown. But Hamelin's mayor refuses to pay him. The piper goes back into the streets and again starts to play his music. This time ''all the little boys and girls, with rosy cheeks and flaxen curls, and sparkling eyes and teeth like pearls'' follow him out of town and into the hills. The piper leads the children to a mountainside, where a portal opens. The children follow him in, the cave closes and Hamelin's children -- all but one, too lame to keep up -- are never seen again.

Montserrat said that she was moved around a lot and often didn't know where she was. She recalled that she was in Detroit for two months before she realized that she was in ''the city where cars are made,'' because the door to the apartment Alejandro kept her in was locked from the outside. She says she was forced to service at least two men a night, and sometimes more. She watched through the windows as neighborhood children played outside. Emotionally, she slowly dissolved. Later, Alejandro moved her to Portland, Ore., where once a week he worked her out of a strip club. In all that time she had exactly one night off; Alejandro took her to see ''Scary Movie 2.''

All the girls I spoke to said that their captors were both psychologically and physically abusive. Andrea told me that she and the other children she was held with were frequently beaten to keep them off-balance and obedient. Sometimes they were videotaped while being forced to have sex with adults or one another. Often, she said, she was asked to play roles: the therapist's patient or the obedient daughter. Her cell of sex traffickers offered three age ranges of sex partners -- toddler to age 4, 5 to 12 and teens -- as well as what she called a ''damage group.'' ''In the damage group they can hit you or do anything they wanted,'' she explained. ''Though sex always hurts when you are little, so it's always violent, everything was much more painful once you were placed in the damage group.

''They'd get you hungry then to train you'' to have oral sex, she said. ''They'd put honey on a man. For the littlest kids, you had to learn not to gag. And they would push things in you so you would open up better. We learned responses. Like if they wanted us to be sultry or sexy or scared. Most of them wanted you scared. When I got older I'd teach the younger kids how to float away so things didn't hurt.''

Kevin Bales of Free the Slaves says: ''The physical path of a person being trafficked includes stages of degradation of a person's mental state. A victim gets deprived of food, gets hungry, a little dizzy and sleep-deprived. She begins to break down; she can't think for herself. Then take away her travel documents, and you've made her stateless. Then layer on physical violence, and she begins to follow orders. Then add a foreign culture and language, and she's trapped.''

Then add one more layer: a sex-trafficking victim's belief that her family is being tracked as collateral for her body. All sex-trafficking operations, whether Mexican, Ukrainian or Thai, are vast criminal underworlds with roots and branches that reach back to the countries, towns and neighborhoods of their victims.

''There's a vast misunderstanding of what coercion is, of how little it takes to make someone a slave,'' Gary Haugen of International Justice Mission said. ''The destruction of dignity and sense of self, these girls' sense of resignation. . . . '' He didn't finish the sentence.

In Tijuana in November, I met with Mamacita, a Mexican trafficking-victim-turned-madam, who used to oversee a stash house for sex slaves in San Diego. Mamacita (who goes by a nickname) was full of regret and worry. She left San Diego three years ago, but she says that the trafficking ring, run by three violent Mexican brothers, is still in operation. ''The girls can't leave,'' Mamacita said. ''They're always being watched. They lock them into apartments. The fear is unbelievable. They can't talk to anyone. They are always hungry, pale, always shaking and cold. But they never complain. If they do, they'll be beaten or killed.''

In Vista, Calif., I followed a pickup truck driven by a San Diego sheriff's deputy named Rick Castro. We wound past a tidy suburban downtown, a supermall and the usual hometown franchises. We stopped alongside the San Luis Rey River, across the street from a Baptist church, a strawberry farm and a municipal ballfield.

A neat subdivision and cycling path ran along the opposite bank. The San Luis Rey was mostly dry, filled now with an impenetrable jungle of 15-foot-high bamboolike reeds. As Castro and I started down a well-worn path into the thicket, he told me about the time he first heard about this place, in October 2001. A local health care worker had heard rumors about Mexican immigrants using the reeds for sex and came down to offer condoms and advice. She found more than 400 men and 50 young women between 12 and 15 dressed in tight clothing and high heels. There was a separate group of a dozen girls no more than 11 or 12 wearing white communion dresses. ''The girls huddled in a circle for protection,'' Castro told me, ''and had big eyes like terrified deer.''

I followed Castro into the riverbed, and only 50 yards from the road we found a confounding warren of more than 30 roomlike caves carved into the reeds. It was a sunny morning, but the light in there was refracted, dreary and basementlike. The ground in each was a squalid nest of mud, tamped leaves, condom wrappers, clumps of toilet paper and magazines. Soiled underwear was strewn here and there, plastic garbage bags jury-rigged through the reeds in lieu of walls. One of the caves' inhabitants had hung old CD's on the tips of branches, like Christmas ornaments. It looked vaguely like a recent massacre site. It was 8 in the morning, but the girls could begin arriving any minute. Castro told me how it works: the girls are dropped off at the ballfield, then herded through a drainage sluice under the road into the riverbed. Vans shuttle the men from a 7-Eleven a mile away. The girls are forced to turn 15 tricks in five hours in the mud. The johns pay $15 and get 10 minutes. It is in nearly every respect a perfect extension of Calle Santo Tomas in Mexico City. Except that this is what some of those girls are training for.

If anything, the women I talked to said that the sex in the U.S. is even rougher than what the girls face on Calle Santo Tomas. Rosario, a woman I met in Mexico City, who had been trafficked to New York and held captive for a number of years, said: ''In America we had 'special jobs.' Oral sex, anal sex, often with many men. Sex is now more adventurous, harder.'' She said that she believed younger foreign girls were in demand in the U.S. because of an increased appetite for more aggressive, dangerous sex. Traffickers need younger and younger girls, she suggested, simply because they are more pliable. In Eastern Europe, too, the typical age of sex-trafficking victims is plummeting; according to Matei of Reaching Out, while most girls used to be in their late teens and 20's, 13-year-olds are now far from unusual.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at the Cyber Crimes Center in Fairfax, Va., are finding that when it comes to sex, what was once considered abnormal is now the norm. They are tracking a clear spike in the demand for harder-core pornography on the Internet. ''We've become desensitized by the soft stuff; now we need a harder and harder hit,'' says I.C.E. Special Agent Perry Woo. Cybernetworks like KaZaA and Morpheus / through which you can download and trade images and videos -- have become the Mexican border of virtual sexual exploitation. I had heard of one Web site that supposedly offered sex slaves for purchase to individuals. The I.C.E. agents hadn't heard of it. Special Agent Don Daufenbach, I.C.E.'s manager for undercover operations, brought it up on a screen. A hush came over the room as the agents leaned forward, clearly disturbed. ''That sure looks like the real thing,'' Daufenbach said. There were streams of Web pages of thumbnail images of young women of every ethnicity in obvious distress, bound, gagged, contorted. The agents in the room pointed out probable injuries from torture. Cyberauctions for some of the women were in progress; one had exceeded $300,000. ''With new Internet technology,'' Woo said, ''pornography is becoming more pervasive. With Web cams we're seeing more live molestation of children.'' One of I.C.E.'s recent successes, Operation Hamlet, broke up a ring of adults who traded images and videos of themselves forcing sex on their own young children.

But the supply of cheap girls and young women to feed the global appetite appears to be limitless. And it's possible that the crimes committed against them in the U.S. cut deeper than elsewhere, precisely because so many of them are snared by the glittery promise of an America that turns out to be not their salvation but their place of destruction.

ENDGAME

Typically, a young trafficking victim in the U.S. lasts in the system for two to four years. After that, Bales says: ''She may be killed in the brothel. She may be dumped and deported. Probably least likely is that she will take part in the prosecution of the people that enslaved her.''

Who can expect a young woman trafficked into the U.S., trapped in a foreign culture, perhaps unable to speak English, physically and emotionally abused and perhaps drug-addicted, to ask for help from a police officer, who more likely than not will look at her as a criminal and an illegal alien? Even Andrea, who was born in the United States and spoke English, says she never thought of escaping, ''because what's out there? What's out there was scarier. We had customers who were police, so you were not going to go talk to a cop. We had this customer from Nevada who was a child psychologist, so you're not going to go talk to a social worker. So who are you going to talk to?''

And if the girls are lucky enough to escape, there's often nowhere for them to go. ''The families don't want them back,'' Sister Veronica, a nun who helps run a rescue mission for trafficked prostitutes in an old church in Mexico City, told me. ''They're shunned.''

When I first met her, Andrea told me: ''We're way too damaged to give back. A lot of these children never wanted to see their parents again after a while, because what do you tell your parents? What are you going to say? You're no good.''





Peter Landesman is a contributing writer for the magazine. He last wrote about illegal weapons trafficking.

Agamben's solidarity with those who are to be fingerprinted in the US

The most apropos comment: "But the scene that unfolded next underscored the moral complexity of a world in which some girls are ambivalent about being rescued and not all brothel owners are monsters."
----------

Bargaining for Freedom


By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: January 21, 2004

POIPET, Cambodia — Srey Neth and Srey Mom were stunned when I proposed buying their freedom from their brothel owners.

"It's unbelievable," Srey Mom said, smiling with an incandescence that seemed to light the street. "There's no problem with taking pictures and telling my story. I want to tell it. But I'm a little afraid that if my mother sees it, she'll be heartbroken."

After I decided to buy the two teenage prostitutes, as recounted in my column on Saturday, I swore them to secrecy for fear that the brothel owners would spirit them away, rather than let them tell their stories. But the first purchase, of Srey Neth, went smoothly.

[For an explanation on how I chose Srey Neth and Srey Mom read my post in the Kristof Reponds forum.]

I woke up her brothel's owner at dawn, handed over $150, brushed off demands for "interest on the debt" and got a receipt for "$150 for buying a girl's freedom." Then Srey Neth and I fled before the brothel's owner was even out of bed.

But at Srey Mom's brothel, her owner announced that the debt was not $70, as the girl had thought, but $400.

"Where are the books?" I asked. A ledger was produced, and it purported to show that Srey Mom owed the equivalent of $337. But it also revealed that the girls were virtually A.T.M.'s for the brothels, generating large sums of cash that the girls were cheated out of. After some grumpy negotiation, the owner accepted $203 as the price for Srey Mom's freedom. But then Srey Mom told me that she had pawned her cellphone and needed $55 to get it back.

"Forget about your cellphone," I said. "We've got to get out of here."

Srey Mom started crying. I told her that she had to choose her cellphone or her freedom, and she ran back to her tiny room in the brothel and locked the door.

In my last column, I described the sex trafficking in places like Cambodia as a modern form of slavery, and I believe that. But the scene that unfolded next underscored the moral complexity of a world in which some girls are ambivalent about being rescued and not all brothel owners are monsters. Some brothel owners use beatings and locked rooms to enslave their girls, but most use debts and ostensible kindness to manipulate them — and the girls are often so naïve, so stigmatized by everyone else and so broken in spirit that this works.

With Srey Mom sobbing in her room and refusing to be freed without her cellphone, the other prostitutes — her closest friends — began pleading with her to be reasonable. So did the brothel's owner.

"Grab this chance while you can," the owner begged Srey Mom. But the girl would not give in. After half an hour of hysterics about the cellphone, I felt so manipulated that I almost walked out. But I finally caved.

"O.K., O.K., I'll get back your cellphone," I told her through the door. The tears stopped.

"My jewelry, too?" she asked plaintively. "I also pawned some jewelry."

So we went to get back the phone and the jewelry — which were, I think, never the real concern. Srey Mom later explained that her resistance had nothing to do with wanting the telephone and everything to do with last-minute cold feet about whether her family and village would accept her if she returned. The possibility of rejection by her mother was almost as frightening as the idea of finishing her life in the brothel.

On our return with the phone and jewelry, the family of the brothel's owner lighted joss sticks for Srey Mom and prayed for her at a Buddhist altar in the foyer of the brothel. The owner (called "Mother" by the girls) warned Srey Mom against returning to prostitution.

Finally, Srey Mom said goodbye to "Mother," the owner who had enslaved her, cheated her and perhaps even helped infect her with the AIDS virus — yet who had also been kind to her when she was homesick, and who had never forced her to have sex when she was ill. It was a farewell of infinite complexity, yet real tenderness.

So now I have purchased the freedom of two human beings so I can return them to their villages. But will emancipation help them? Will their families and villages accept them? Or will they, like some other girls rescued from sexual servitude, find freedom so unsettling that they slink back to slavery in the brothels? We'll see. 

This just in from the NY Times editorial writer,

Nicholas Kristof:

Girls for Sale


By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF



POIPET, Cambodia

One thinks of slavery as an evil confined to musty sepia photographs. But there are 21st-century versions of slaves as well, girls like Srey Neth.

I met Srey Neth, a lovely, giggly wisp of a teenager, here in the wild smuggling town of Poipet in northwestern Cambodia. Girls here are bought and sold, but there is an important difference compared with the 19th century: many of these modern slaves will be dead of AIDS by their 20's.

Some 700,000 people are trafficked around the world each year, many of them just girls. They form part of what I believe will be the paramount moral challenge we will face in this century: to address the brutality that is the lot of so many women in the developing world. Yet it's an issue that gets little attention and that most American women's groups have done shamefully little to address.

Poipet, 220 miles on bouncy roads from Phnom Penh, is a dusty collection of dirt alleys lined with brothels, where teenage girls clutch at any man walking by. It has a reputation as one of the wildest places in Cambodia, an anything-goes town ruled by drugs, gangs, gambling and prostitution.

The only way to have access to the girls is to appear to be a customer. So I put out the word that I wanted to meet young girls and stayed at the seedy $8-a-night Phnom Pich Guest House and a woman who is a pimp soon brought Srey Neth to my room.

Srey Neth claimed to be 18 but looked several years younger. She insisted at first (through my Khmer interpreter) that she was free and not controlled by the guesthouse. But soon she told her real story: a female cousin had arranged her sale and taken her to the guesthouse. Now she was sharing a room with three other prostitutes, and they were all pimped to guests.

"I can walk around in Poipet, but only with a close relative of the owner," she said. "They keep me under close watch.They do not let me go out alone. They're afraid I would run away."

Why not try to escape at night?

"They would get me back, and something bad would happen. Maybe a beating. I heard that when a group of girls tried to escape, they locked them in the rooms and beat them up."

"What about the police?" I asked. "Couldn't you call out to the police for help?"

"The police wouldn't help me because they get bribes from the brothel owners," Srey Neth said, adding that senior police officials had come to the guesthouse for sex with her.

I asked Srey Neth how much it would cost to buy her freedom. She named an amount equivalent to $150.

"Do you really want to leave?" I asked. "Are you sure you wouldn't come back to this?"

She had been watching TV and listlessly answering my questions. Now she turned abruptly and snorted. "This is a hell," she said sharply, speaking with passion for the first time. "You think I want to do this?"

Another girl, Srey Mom, grabbed at me as I walked down the street. She wouldn't let go, tugging me toward the inner depths of her brothel but she looked so young and pitiable that I couldn't help thinking that she really wanted me to tug her away.

So I did. I paid the owner $8 to spring her for the evening and then took her away for an interview. (Photographs of both girls are at www.nytimes.com/kristof.)

The owner let Srey Mom go out unsupervised, it turned out, partly because she had been a prostitute for several years and was trusted to return and partly because her dark complexion meant that she was of little value anyway. The brothel sold her to men for just $2.50, compared with the $10 commanded by the lighter-skinned Srey Neth.

I asked Srey Mom what her freedom would cost. Payment of about $70 in debts to her brothel owner, she said. Two girls in her brothel had been freed after they found boyfriends who paid their debts, she said, and she spoke of her longing to see her sisters and the rest of her family in her village on the other side of Cambodia.

"Do you really want to leave the brothel?" I asked.

"I love myself," she answered simply. "I do not want to let my life be destroyed by what I'm doing now."

That's when I made a firm decision I'd been toying with for some time: I would try to buy freedom for these two girls and return them to their families. I'll tell you in my column on Wednesday what happens next.

--------------------

On the one hand, it's admirable that Kristof would make the effort to buy these young women out of sexual slavery, but it's naive to assume that won't be sold off by family or relatives again once they return home. And, naturally, as a liberal columnist for the Times, Kristof will never address the deeper issues of global inequality that create the conditions of possibility for his own nobility and his own complicity in their circumstances, to which, with good conscience no doubt, he will attempt to release them. Still, it's good to see the NYT in particular addressing this problem for a change.

January 14, 2004 marked the fifth anniversary of the death of Bryn Jones, prolific ethno-electronic musician Muslimgauze. A tribute at WSIA, College of Staten Island, can be found here:

http://transilvanianhunger.org/muslimgauze.ogg

Information on converting ogg files can be found here:

http://www.vorbis.com/

Currently at WHRB, Harvard's radio station and online at http://www.whrb.org is a twenty two hour "orgy" of the Erstwhile catalogue. Great to hear this stuff here and supposedly will be archived.

The following essay appeared in 2002 in the political theory journal Strategies. The issue dealt with the work of Gilles Deleuze:

I. Preliminaries

In the fields of cutting edge electronica, it has become quite fashionable to invoke the name of Gilles Deleuze. Displaced former philosophy students find a home spinning records and programming beats in underground night clubs, creating “sound installations,” or forming music labels. As club culture becomes commodified, commercialized, and reterritorialized by a market eager for hipper objects, the necessity for newer undergrounds and a more compelling discourse of modernity force mutations in electronica and a theoretical legitimacy for the philosopher-turned-alchemist of sound, the only one seemingly able to articulate the present moment in the post-ekstasis fog of serotonin depletion. It was Iannis Xenakis who once stated, “henceforth, a musician should be a manufacturer of philosophical theses and global systems of architecture, of combinations of structures (forms) and different kinds of sound matter.” And, likewise, the philosopher should become the “musician,” more aptly the one who amalgamates sound. It was only a matter of time before an electronica solely servile to the dance floor would become conceptually and aesthetically boring, where the need to rediscover its origins and histories in the forms of musique concrète, minimalism, experimentalism, in short, in the avant-garde, would become manifest. But this revivified avant-garde is not far removed from very many of the now overdetermined and instrumentalized popular forms that preceded it. Contemporary “high-art” electronica has been soiled by its techno precursors—-if not on the dance floor, then, at least, the lounge or especially the institute of modern art, whether it be in New York, Berlin, or Tokyo.
If the contemporary permutations of electronic “music” are now fit for the sound installations of art institutes, the adjoining artist statement is always forthcoming. The “avant-god” trinity of John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Pierre Henry is perpetually invoked--symbols of a by-gone era of the avant-garde that paved the way for the modern laptop producer. The other significant proper name is that of Deleuze, whose concept of the “desiring machine,” according to a reading of Simon Reynolds, properly cathected with the DJ’s “thousand plateaus of crescendo” in the rave set, itself a product of a “machinic assemblage” of aural objets trouvés and synthetic computer-generated sounds. One of the first music producers to invoke Deleuze’s name in the context of his own writing on music was DJ Spooky, aka Paul Miller, a student of philosophy as well as a music producer, one so articulate that his recognition comes as much from his writing in a variety of New York art journals as from his music. DJ Spooky is a theorist of hybridity, a “cultural nomad” who finds his intensities while circulating schizophrenically between hip hop parties, academic conferences, and museum performances, a mixer of variegated assemblages that work in the interstices of dub, hip hop, ambient, trip hop, and jungle, an concoction sometimes referred to as “illbient,” which found its ethos in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. While he finds in his work a resonance with Deleuze’s concepts, the gaze toward theory seems to have reversed itself. DJ Spooky is now on the faculty of the European Graduate School with the likes of Jean Baudrillard, Jean Luc-Nancy, Christopher Fynsk, Peter Greenaway, and David Lynch.
The turn to Deleuze is also apparent in Richard Pinhas and Maurice Dantec’s electronic soundscape, “Schizotrope,” a recording using extended ambient washes of processed guitar and other electronics with Dantec’s processed voice reading texts from Gilles Deleuze. On the final track of the CD, Deleuze, himself, is doing the reading. Nowhere, however, has the turn to Gilles Deleuze’s work by music producers been more clear than with Achim Szepanski and his Frankfurt based label Mille Plateaux. Szepanski holds a PhD in philosophy and has written a dissertation on Michel Foucault. But it was his interest in techno, house, and other forms of electronic music that allowed him to carry out his particular version of micro-politics, analogical struggles outside the state and economic apparatuses, in this case the compromises made by electronic dance music with the order of commodities and capital more generally. His first label, Force, Inc., was an innovative response to the limitations of techno and house and an attempt to return these forms to their more properly underground status. The hardcore of producers like Alec Empire and Panacea were the vehicle. Anthologies, like the “Electric Ladyland” series, showcased the abrasive, percussive “garbage can” timbres of hardcore as well as the more lounge beats of trip-hop. On another sub-label, Position Chrome, one can find the more aggressive hardcore of artists like Techno Animal, featuring dub producer Kevin Martin and Justin Broaderick, guitarist with the heavy metal group, Godflesh. However, it is on Mille Plateaux and its sister label Ritornell where Szepanski’s artists make their particular contribution to an avant-garde rooted in musique concrete and minimalism as well as a response to electronic genres like ambient. Though Mille Plateaux was founded in 1994, its manifesto came in 1996, the seminal recording of “In Memoriam: Gilles Deleuze,” which followed the philosopher’s suicide in Paris. The CD is a double compilation of 27 tracks, one of which has Deleuze reading a short piece on the rhizome. A second track produced by Achim Wollscheid includes samples of a French rock band and Deleuze reading another text, with both combinations of sounds being heavily processed. DJ Spooky makes an appearance with an extended, Xenakis-like drone, and so does Scanner, the British artist also known as Robin Rimbaud, who uses a police scanner to pilfer real-world samples from telephone booths and elsewhere, the theft unbeknownst to those making the utterances that serve as aural material for his recordings. Musique concrète meets the “purloined letter.”
Perhaps the most noteworthy of all the experimental artists and producers included in the Mille Plateaux compilation is Oval, originally a Frankfurt-based trio headed by Markus Popp, who is presently the sole artist in the group. In the mid-nineties, Oval made a name for itself by its use of damaged technologies, namely the use of deliberately marked and disfigured CDs that when played, created percussive clips and pops. This was a technique that was adopted in principle by Pole’s Stefan Betke using a damaged, malfunctioning Waldorf 4 Pole-Filter to generate crackles and dub echo effects. Soon enough, the “glitch” became a genre unto itself, used by an array of artists dissatisfied with the aural limits of programs written for Powerbooks. With Oval and Pole, as with the DJs who discovered the percussive possibilities of turntable cartridge needles and crackly, old vinyl, the distinction between properly operating technology and anathematized glitches was deconstructed. The “mistake” became an aesthetic “success;” pops, clips, crackles and other mayhem became the soundtrack of a new generation of musicians and listeners. Interestingly, in a private letter from Deleuze to Szepanski regarding the inauguration of the Mille Plateaux label, it was Oval that impressed Deleuze the most, rather than the ambient drones of Gas’ Wolfgang Voigt the new avantgardism of Christophe Charles, or the nearly inaudible opening strains of Jim O’Rourke’s “As In,” tracks that were widely respected in a number of critical responses. In listening to some of the artists of Mille Plateaux, it is easy to become confused about what one is hearing. Is it radio static? Is it television interference? Is it a fire alarm? Soon enough, these particles of deviant sound begin to assume a form that could no longer be presumed as an unintended aural intrusion.
Nevertheless, the deterritorialization of the “glitch” quickly became reterritorialized in popular electronica. There was an effective detumescence of the hyper-intensity that accompanied its discovery. However, the boredom that finally greeted “glitch aesthetics” was a disapprobation that did not completely turn away from the pointillist, percussive advantages of clips and pops. In the early months of 2000, Mille Plateaux released the compilation “clicks_+_cuts,” which articulated the mutation of the “glitch” into a more onomatopoetic signifier, one far less aligned with “errors” of the machine than its benefits as a generator of minimal sound particles, or “microsounds,” used in an assemblage toward an abstraction having very little to do with conventional music. In the liner notes, Sascha Kösch articulates the new minimalism embodied by “clicks_+_cuts:”
You have come here; you must think about minimalism, be it the minimalism of “rich” kinds of “idea-based,” “abstract” experiments, or the “poor” minimalism of reduced sound design, abstractions of subtraction. You clicked, somebody delivered. Whatever happened, thoughts of minimalism, of reduced interfaces, reduction of input or musical preferences will have led you to “clicks & cuts.” And with it you will be introduced to a new differentiation of your concept of the minimalist notion. The digital routing of ideas based on sound, its flaws, delicacies, its enlightenment, and its value for the times to come. It’s clicks & cuts. And as you guessed, it clicks and cuts. Remember the days when all was easy? When a new sound created a sound generation every couple of months, and progression was not an internal quality of electronic music, but its driving force?…times when a new genre wasn’t just a sub-something of a sub-something, but fact? Well, stop remembering; these days have arrived once again, and they have changed.

But the “minimalism” invoked here is hardly adequate for defining the distinctive character of a rapidly evolving genre of electronic music. In no way was the new minimalism represented by the “click” comparable to the experiments of Steve Reich and others in the milieu of the sixties and seventies avant-classical tradition. “Microlism,” were there such a term, would have been a more appropriate designation. As it is, practitioners of the new aesthetic have favored this new term of “microsound” to describe the music they produce. Such a term suggests both the inscrutability of the pointillist “click,” as well as the “microtonal” possibilities of the laptop as a musical instrument, the creation of sounds within, between, and outside normative scales—-sound itself as a mode of deterritorialization. One of the founders of the aesthetic, Kim Cascone, has been an outspoken critic of the use of the term “minimalism” to describe the field. In an interview with the journal CTheory, he stated, “I have always felt that the term minimalism when applied to music has been misused. It is difficult to create a work which is emptied of content and refers to itself. All artwork references external reality in some way…but yes, I find minimalism to be an aesthetic dead end. It carries less and less information with repetition and I am much more interested in density of information i.e. multiple channels of information all turned on at once while listeners position themselves within this field.” Cascone has two CDs released on Mille Plateaux’ experimental sub-label, Ritornell: “Cathode Flower” and more recently “Residualism.” On the seminal three CD compilation “Modulations and Transformations 4,” he contributes the piece “nb2e_vortex.aiff” a title that draws attention to the tools of sound production (“aiff” being a primary sound file format) and the abstraction of a computer file, one might say, a “de-aestheticization” (in the sense of opposing an emotive overdetermination) of the “aesthetic” object. In “order-words” that partially serve to reenact McLuhan, he states, "the medium is no longer the message, the tool has become the message.” Cascone’s piece, however, belongs to a tradition of experimental ambient but one without the standard aesthetic investments. There is a spatiality to the sound. High pitched metallic timbres circulate around airy lower frequencies. The work of Xenakis and Ferrari is perhaps recalled, though Cascone cites Leif Brush as an influence as well. Cascone has also noted how microsound has refused to comply with popular culture’s proviso regarding the performative. The live performance of the contemporary laptop producer is liable to feature a musician occasionally staring for long periods at a screen saver, a disappointment for an audience trained to appreciate what multi-reed instrumentalist Anthony Braxton has called the “sweat factor” or what Cascone describes as “gestural theatre.”
The resulting difficulty most people have with laptop performance is exacerbated by the fact that most people today arrive at electronic music through the cultural framework (and hence expectations) of pop culture...and even within the cultural framework of 20th century music there are people who still cling to the notion that music performance needs to carry a visual counterpart…to the actual music being produced...as if the music is made more rich or meaningful through the gestures of a performer...people can't let go of needing to verify causality in a musical setting.

For Cascone, and this is perhaps where he finds his closest affinity with Deleuze, the laptop provides the contemporary electronic musician with an immediate and completely proximate relationship with his ideas, one that “bypasses most of the apparatus that has been put into place by pop culture over the past 100 years,” a contrivance that required the “motor skills” needed to perform impressively on a musical instrument rather than the capacities required for creating new aural concepts. The audience at a microsound performance has then perhaps been transformed unwittingly to a voyeur in a studio, an overseer of a process of production. The “untimely” sense to recognize this transmutation, however, has yet to arrive.
Nevertheless, this new articulation of microsound has found a certain currency and is rapidly being reterrorialized by a music industry quick to locate new objects. Christian Fennesz’ “Endless Summer,” a reconfiguration through microsound of the Beach Boys record of the same name, has hit the bestseller lists at a number of record stores, including Other Music in Manhattan. Kid 606, who also appears on the “Clicks & Cuts” compilation has become a favorite in IDM circles, and 22-year old Helsinki producer, Vladislav Delay, who released nearly a half-dozen recordings during 2000, has become one of Mille Plateaux’ biggest commercial successes with two CDs under his name for the label and another two under the monikers Luomo, a click-house project, and Uusitalo. His acclaimed “Synkopoint” on the “Clicks & Cuts” compilation, a variation from his first release on Mille Plateaux “Entain,” was a favorite of many microsound producers and fans because of its dreamy dub and ambient effects and heavily reverberated production. The double CD was also an opportunity for the label to feature artists from Ritornell, which focuses on more abstract forms of microsound, including artists such as Stilluppsteypa, an Icelandic trio now based in Amsterdam, and the now defunct German duo Autopoieses. Stilluppsteypa has also been at the forefront of the newer forms of electro-acoustic improvisation documented on labels such as Erstwhile and Staalplaat.
It seems fitting, then, that with the “speed” and proliferation of music, artists, and new labels, as well as a “do-it-yourself” mode of production enabled by the new technologies, and the lack of an adequate rhetoric to explain, describe, and theorize the new developments in the music, that Mille Plateaux would celebrate its one hundredth release by initiating a book project to fill the gap. In an essay outlining the project, one worth tarrying on here, Szepanski writes:
Today, music is information and can be digitalized in the form of binary coding. In every form, it is connotated with computer systems, implemented into the “age of technology”, and can be described with a “techno-aesthetic concept to which electronic media is everything but external. It is media-music, independent from whether media are discussed as being constructivistic, being medially technical dispositives, a distorted atopic space for transmissions or not.

This notion of music as “information” can be seen in the individual producer’s writing/production of “patches,” sound passages that form the material of the composition and that are sometimes shared among producers. Szepanski continues:
It is surprising that, besides the explication of mediality of significants and the large number of discourses concerning the medial ways of visibility, the musical field most often is not mentioned within the media discourse. If, in the sector of the visual, illustration and interpretation of reality increasingly are left behind a visualization of pure visibility, least of the media concepts realize the musical information packages and their medial constructions which, in their ecstatic growth, do not (re)present reality but only themselves.

And so the strategy for articulating a discourse of experimental electronic music in media theory is called for in this announcement, a movement from the visual production to the aural one, the “under-represented” by virtue of being “non-representational.” Music is a “language” of sound, but one that communicates in “multiplicities.” It cannot be reduced to “communication,” but it “communicates,” an aural stimulus driven by the agitation of rhythm, the spatiality of tone. “Music does not function as a carrier of messages but offers nothing but empty signification and resists any attempt for decoding. So it more or less allows any form of interpretation. Its only content is that of its own sound and the sound of a reality existing outside.” Yet, mediation occurs between hardware--the Powerbook; the software program--MAX/MSP, SuperCollider, Reaktor, C Sound; and the patch designer or programmer—-for example, Akira Rabelais, producer and author of sound programs like Argeiphontes Lyre. The media is the binary code, punctuated, microtonal clicks, or glitches used for syncopated effects as well as rhythmic refrains.
Szepanski insists, though, that electronic music is not simply a part of media theory; electronic music interrogates it—-through the “mutual attacks of heterogeneous forms,” as Deleuze referred to it. Music is part of an information technology that does not “generate its forms out of itself but out of elements of all systems.” Szepanski notes, “music has stopped being a mathematical science of intervals.…Electronic synthesis instruments sound in the in-between of the intervals and analogue media store the real infinitely variable, independent from the dictate of notation and the imperativism of analogue instruments.” The result is that the digital machine “cover[s] up meaning, disrupt[s] sense, delete[s] historical markings and traces.” Clicks and cuts are the “interval” that exceeds all intervals in the musical scales, the “in-between” of the in-between. The on-and-off logic of the binary code, the click and cut, can only “develop as the context of an event, e.g. a musical event, a consistent coupling with musical forms like Clickhouse, Clicktechno, R & B Click, Glitchfunk, Neuronenhouse, etc.” The click and cut are thus the aural equivalent of an amplification of a mouseclick made by a musician that creates an agitation of the nervous system and a sound commensurate to the breach of connectivity; “every track is more a temporary interruption of the ability to be connected rather than fixedly regular work.” Therefore, “clicks do not express meanings or essences but only intensity and connections” as well as disconnections. For Deleuze and Guattari, these are the “unthinkable, invisible, nonsonorous” forces that must be harnessed from the deterritorialized, molecular outside of the Cosmos. Writing at an earlier time when the digital had a long way to go before superseding the analogue, Deleuze and Guattari anticipated the aesthetics of microsound:
The synthesizer has taken the place of the old “a priori synthetic judgment,” and all functions change accordingly. By placing all its components in continuous variation, music itself becomes a superlinear system, a rhizome instead of a tree, and enters the service of a virtual cosmic continuum of which even holes, silences, ruptures, and breaks are a part.

However, if we are to carefully follow their suggestion about the continuous variation of synthesized sound, we must not make the mistake of reterritorializing the new movement in sound as the “becoming” of microsound but rather perhaps the “becoming-microsound” of synthesized sound in general. Deleuze and Guattari continue:
By assembling modules, source elements, and elements for treating sound (oscillators, generators, and transformers), by arranging microintervals, the synthesizer makes audible the sound process itself, the production of that process, and puts us in contact with still other elements beyond sound matter.


II. The Enunciation
The “superlinear, rhizomatic system” that Deleuze and Guattari had in mind regarding the synthesizer could not possibly have foreseen the extreme variations of aural experience found in the work of Ryoji Ikeda, both a contemporary and important influence for many microsound musicians and producers. As with a number of musicians that work with sine waves, Ikeda’s music not only changes with repeated listens but also within each individual aural experience through varying one’s position of the head and location in the room. The sine wave belongs with clicks, hisses, pops, and other onomatopoeic descriptors to the aberrant types of sound that find their currency in the present milieu of experimental electronic music. In the case of a sine wave musician such as Sachiko Matsubara, who employs a sampler divested of all preprogrammed sounds exclusive of the sine waves conventionally used for tuning, a novel reconception of an otherwise unutilized and anathematized sound parallels the Mille Plateaux’ recuperation of the click. Ikeda works with similar material.
Ikeda’s third release on the British label Touch is a two CD set called “::Matrix.” The first is entitled “Matrix [for rooms].” A solitary liner note explains that the piece, a suite of ten tracks, each named as a separate array as a part of a matrix of binary code, “forms an invisible pattern which fills the listening space. The listener’s movement transforms the phenomenon into his or her intrapersonal music.” Unlike the pops, clicks, and hisses that animate many of the releases on Mille Plateaux, “Matrix [for rooms]” is characterized by high and low frequency pulsations, a tapestry of peaks and valleys of sound intensities. The first, “0000000001” is precisely twelve minutes of variably pulsing, high frequency sine waves. The aural experience shifts as I move around in my living space between my chair, the kitchen area, the bathroom, and behind the speakers. As my head moves, the sounds seem to be coming out of my left ear, which is furthest away from the speakers, whereas my right ear seems to hear very little. As my head moves, seemingly unintended sub-frequencies become audible. By the second and third tracks, “0000000010” and “0000000100” respectively, the lower frequencies begin to assume prominence and the higher ones fade out. These lower frequency sine waves rattle the light fixtures in my room at higher volumes, with the audible sub-frequencies changing in pitch and becoming more loud. The sounds can be quite disconcerting in their trance-inducing repetition. At certain moments during my listening, I begin to feel nauseous, which leads me to leave my chair and pace the room, perhaps the unwitting intent of the piece I am hearing—-encouraging my active aural engagement with the recording. By the fifth track, “0000010000,” median frequencies are prominent. When I turn my head to the left, the frequencies appear to rise in pitch and pulsate more, but when I turn my head to the right, sub-frequency pulsations begin to sound percussive. Because of these variations in pitch, frequency and intensity, affected by my position in the room and the movement of my head, I am not very clear about what I am actually hearing, other than the abstract, pulsing frequencies of varying levels. There is no primary sound exclusive of my listening. Each time I change a physical position, the piece changes as well. Within the structure he creates, Ikeda manages to pose an infinite degree of sound qualities in the same composition, within a singular aural experience. Thus, his music can be said to be indeterminate while, ironically, the timing of the tracks is quite precise and regular. The entire first CD, “Matrix [for rooms],” is exactly sixty minutes in length. The first track is exactly twelve minutes long. The second, fourth, sixth, and eight tracks are precisely five minutes and thirty seconds in length, and the third, fifth, seventh, and ninth tracks are four minutes and thirty seconds long. Only the tenth track, “1000000000” clocks in at 7:58. By the eighth track, “0010000000,” the sine wave tone has once again reached a very high pitch, and I find myself moving my head in concentric circles in order to change the aural results. Finally, the tenth track is a recombination of both the lower and higher frequency sine waves that comprised the second track as the suite reaches a conclusion with nearly inaudible super-high pitches. The ultimate effect is comparable to an auditory cleaning, as if the “keys” of one’s eardrum were being tuned like a piano.
The second CD, “. Matrix,” is shorter than the first and the binary code is inverted for naming the tracks. The first is called “1111111110.” The tenth is named “0111111111.” Sine waves remain, but we are returned to the characteristic clicks, hisses and static so well-described by Szepanski. The length of the tracks varies far more than on the first CD though there seems to be a regularity of sorts, if not a pattern, in the length of the tracks. One, for example, is 5:32 while another is 5:23. Both sets of numbers adding up to ten, in other words, the number of tracks on the recording. A more clear compositional structure seems to emerge in the combinations and sequencing of lower and higher frequencies and beats. For me, this 31 minute recording is not as conceptually interesting in a Deleuzian sense. We are presented with an aural assemblage emblematic of microsound recordings but without the internal variations evident in the first CD.
Ikeda’s most well-known and respected work of electronic music was the 1996 release “+/--” on Touch. As with “::Matrix,” the aural experience of “+/--” depends on individual circumstances—the listener’s movement and location. The liner notes state that the CD “has a particular sonority whose quality is determined by one’s listening point in relation to the loudspeakers. Furthermore, the listener can experience a particular difference between speaker playback and headphone listening. The sound signals can be thought of in the same way as light is made spotlight. Lastly, a high frequency sound is used that the listener becomes aware of only upon its disappearance.” Rarely does one encounter such explanations on commercially sold music. Ikeda seems to require it, however. The timing of “+/--” suggests that it was perhaps the enabling condition of what became microsound, what led Szepanski to create his experimental sub-label named for Deleuze and Guattari’s chapter on the refrain or ritornell. It was also the first instance of the use of the term “headphonics” to describe Ikeda’s particular minimalist aesthetic. The first three tracks form the suite of “Headphonics”—combinations of high frequency sine waves with beats and hisses. The final seven tracks of the CD form the suite of “+/--” itself. The fourth track in the suite, “+” sounds like a helicopter propeller, recorded and remixed. Eventually the track transforms into the rapid and dense percussive beats of “+ .” a mutation of the propeller, almost recalling a drill, with sine waves blending into the soundscape. Despite the intense rhythms, the listener isn’t compelled to move. The beats are relentless but not catchy. They are percussive but have the metallic timbres of digital processing. “+ .” transforms into “+ ..” and while the percussive rhythms remain at the same speed and intensity, the tone becomes softer; the pitch rises until the piece is abruptly ended, and we move to the trio of “—” pieces, high frequency sine waves with an underlying ostensible drone of a generator pulsating against the walls and metallic fixtures of the room. We have returned to the “headphonics” that will compel the listener to move around the room and turn his head from side to side. Toward the left, the sine waves seem to be pulsing; toward the right, the pitch seems higher and there is only a mild pulse. The eighth track, “-- .” is a gorgeous symphony of sine wave patterns moving in and out of the center of the listening space, whereas the ninth track “-- ..” recalls the low frequency generator sounds of “+”. The deep pulsing timbres appear reflect off the far corner of my ceiling, almost as if they were coming from above the room. These intense sounds do not appear to be coming from the speakers at all, and as I place my ears next to the speakers, I can hear they are not. Instead, the low frequency pulses are occurring fifteen feet away in the corners of my room. It occurs to me during this particular listening of “+/--” that the aural equivalent of Deleuze’s texts are not to be found so much in the music label that carries the name of one of his works, but rather in Ryoji Ikeda’s rich and variform recordings. The final track, which carries the name of the title of the CD, is simply the almost inaudible sine wave that inhabits the entire recording, which, as the liner note promised, only became apparent in its absence as the brief one-minute piece closed.
Ikeda’s “0°C” released in 1998, completes the trilogy on Touch. “C” is a suite of ten tracks, each named with a different word beginning with the letter “c”: “check, cacoepy, circuit, contexture, cuts, counterpoint, continuum, can[n]on, cadenza, coda [for T.F.].” This suite is followed by the suite of three tracks that comprise “0°”. “C” employs static, hisses, the ostensible interference of radio frequencies, voices, and sine waves. It’s a recording that belongs more notably to the genre of click & cuts than Ikeda’s other recordings because of the focus on glitches, which in the case of one of tracks, is technical interference with an apparent broadcast of string instruments. In other moments, one hears something approximating a highly frenetic version of “drum n’ bass” as well as a sound that resembles a ringer. “C” is closer to the defining features of musique concrète than in his other recordings, both in terms of its use of frequency “interference” and conventional looping strategies. However, the motif of “headphonics” is still evident through the use of affectingly vacillating sine wave patterns. Ikeda’s minimalism is finally a paradoxical one. Though he builds his compositions with an assemblage of particulates of sine wave frequencies, hisses, clicks, intentional “glitches” and other aural material, the products from his efforts manage to maximize the potentialities of aural spaces. Ikeda’s aesthetic is a minimalism of maximal, that is, variable, aural consequences. “Gestures and things, voices and sounds, are caught up in the same `opera,’ swept away by the same shifting effects of stammering, vibrato, tremolo, and overspilling.”

III. The Interrogation

To further understand the relationship between theory and electronica, it is necessary to consider the perspectives of music producers, particularly those with a more theoretical orientation. DJ Tobias van Veen of Vancouver, is one of the more articulate spokespersons in the field of microsound and the curator of the “New Forms Festival,” and Ian Andrews, a music producer from Sydney, has written articles on theory and technology.

Q: What concepts in Deleuze's texts, especially “Mille Plateaux,” do you find most significant and why?

DJ Tobias: "1837: Of the Refrain" is certainly directly significant in thinking electronic music in terms of its repetitious nature. By redefining "rhythm" especially, one can interpret Deleuze and Guattari as attempting to think of a music or aural deterritorialization that moves away from music-of-territory, or that redefines the topological nature of music. I think, however, that in general what attracts electronic musicians to "Mille Plateaux" is its connections between all forms of experience, of which music plays a large part. These connections--embodied in terms such as the line of flight, deterritorialization, the refrain, the rhizome, etc-- and their constant nature of becoming become especially relevant when they can be visually observed in a program such as Max/MSP or Audiomulch and then subsequently heard in a space that is often "deterritorialized." This is easier understood when one considers that much of microsound and avant-garde electronica comes out of a post-rave(r) culture, that is, out of a culture that was already indirectly influenced by Deleuze and Guattari through the writing of Hakim Bey on the TAZ [Temporary Autonomous Zone].

Ian Andrews: First of all I'd just like to sound a warning. There are far too many poor readings of Deleuze, in my opinion, especially in relation to sound and music. Be careful what you read. Few people read anything but A Thousand Plateaus and even fewer read Nietzsche or Freud (both very important for accessing Deleuze's work. For example, Anti-Oedipus is a very different book than A Thousand Plateaus. It is a playful, irreverent, Dionysian punk rant against the monoliths of Hegel, Marx and a certain Freud. This text resists an authoritative reading, and it’s a mistake made by many to do what can't be done--i.e. to hold it up as an authoritative text. A Thousand Plateaus, on the other hand, is much more authoritative (though it pretends not to be). It constantly builds concepts that, although they attempt to be fluid and non-hierarchic (rhizomatic), they can't help solidifying. And this results (in the worst case) in a dialogue between Deleuzians, in their own private language, isolated from their textual roots (Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, Bergson, Spinoza, Pierce, etc.) This is where I find Derridean deconstruction useful. It finds a way to make use of a concept while, at the same time, not allowing that concept to settle into a hierarchy of knowledge. It does this by carefully and rigorously describing what it does, at the time of doing it—its basic premise is that there is no transcendental idea, outside of language--"there is nothing outside the text."

Q: Comment on the relationships between new software and hardware technologies and Deleuze's theories of machinic assemblages.

DJ Tobias: All you have to do is load up Max/MSP or Audiomulch to directly experience what Deleuze was thinking. Insert the sampler box, draw a line to the volume, draw a variable controller, which then operates an echo box processing a granular synthesis box, all hooked into a 4x4 matrix output. Push play, and then begin adjusting the variables, redrawing the lines to form feedback loops or resampling continuums. You interact with it: it interacts with you (unlike Cascone—-I do not believe-—as Cascone seems to-—that we solely operate the machine: the screen and the program, the assemblage, programs us to love the assemblage. As Janne Vanhanen comments [see his article in CTheory] , we are in loving relationship with machines [see also Steven Shaviro's article "The Erotic Life of Machines" on Bjork]).

Q: How might you explain the new minimalist aesthetics of the “click and cut” (and perhaps the “glitch” as well) in relation to the older minimalism? A line of flight? Or a continuation of a version of avantgardism?

DJ Tobias: That is a long and difficult question because the framework we are asking is ambiguous: are we questioning historical links? And if so, are we beginning to interpret these links rhizomatically or in a Hegelian fashion? I think, however, there is much to be said for understanding the role of the DJ in the 1980s, as Paul Miller (DJ Spooky) often talks about: the refrain as the memory repeater, the DJ as the memory selector, putting memories into new contexts to trigger associative, rhizomatic thoughts.

Ian Andrews: It constitutes a version of avantgardism. However this avantgardism represents, in my opinion, a return to purity. In this sense it becomes a rejection of postmodernism, which is OK, but it’s a rejection which oversimplifies the problems raised by the postmodern condition (the question of the possibility of an avant-garde, or of plural avant-gardes, etc.). And in many cases it simply ignores many of these problems and re-situates itself in modernist historicism. This simplification is aided by a technologically determinist ideology which argues that new technology is the single determining factor in producing new cultural forms. I feel that a significant amount of cultural history (and cultural theory) has been conveniently bypassed—the period roughly between the 1970s and the 1990s—in order to make this link between the old minimalism of the 1960s and the new. It seems that ideas concerning intertextuality, self-reflexivity, irony, culture-jamming, and recombinant media practices have all been dismissed without any good theoretical justification except that they have simply gone out of fashion. I must admit that I was at first enticed by the purity of click & cut, glitch, microsound, etc. but the attempt to theorize it lead to a dead end. And I have not come across any text which provides a justification for this return to purity. On the other hand, perhaps it resists theorization. That's a possibility.

Q: It could perhaps be argued that the enabling condition of microsound would be musique concrète, the synthesizer, Reich’s experiments with tape loops of voices sped up to create new sonorities and multiplicities, and other of the earlier experiments in electronic media, not to mention modernist conceptions of music, atonal music, etc. These movements have also had their reception in techno music, another important precursor of microsound. How do you see microsound as both a continuation of these musical forerunners but also as a departure from them?

DJ Tobias: For me at least, both continuation and departure fall into the trap that I believe Cascone falls into--that of defining microsound as a system, subject to entropy, that has borders and boundaries. If it truly is influenced by Deleuze and Guattari, and furthermore, if the technology itself and our interaction with it is approaching the erotic rhizomatic, then we are hopefully understanding that techno and musique concrète are relationships that continue to move in and out of microsound territory (this can be seen in the lineup of the Mutek festival for example). Essentially what is different IS the relation to technology.

Ian Andrews: Yes, techno is very important here. There is a tendency among many members of the [microsound community] to deny that. Perhaps microsound could have happened without techno but it would not have been nearly as popular or as widespread. It would not have become a movement. Just like 1980s "industrial" experimental music would not have happened in the same way without the punk phenomenon. The passage from techno (Detroit) through minimal techno, through glitch has resulted, to a large extent, in a rejection of textual elements, and an embracing of sensual effect (immersion, synaesthesia, overtones, etc.) which can be traced back to rave culture (and of course minimalists such as La Monte Young, Charlemagne Palestine, etc.).

Q: Some may argue that invoking the proper name “Deleuze” and the text Mille Plateaux, with respect to the Frankfurt label, constitutes a re-territorialization of theory in the legitimating service of “art,” a movement akin to the prior use of Jean Baudrillard by visual artists and artistic institutions such as “Artforum.” How do you respond to such a potential charge? Can there ever be such an invocation of theory that does not simply serve as a legitimizing discourse for capitalized art objects?

DJ Tobias: Cascone specifically wants to legitimate the microsound genre with theory. I think there is nothing wrong with using theory as one would use say, oil for a car. The oil doesn't legitimate the car. It just makes it run. I think what should be questioned certainly is this notion of legitimacy or authenticity in relation to theory and art. Theory does not provide legitimacy: neither does art: it is only when the two are combined into a mechanism--a machinic assemblage, what-have-you, that the project takes off "on a line of flight" etc.

Q: What artists do you feel have best liberated themselves from the traditional rules of music and the overdetermined forms of aesthetic practice?

DJ Tobias: Liberation! I'm not so sure that word is possible for me. Despite that microsound seems to be radically quite different, we must remember that it has bought into an entirely different relationship to traditions and rules. The very narrow genre of microsound and its constituent definitions assures this. The strict relation to technology, and a very particular sort of technology that creates very specific sounds and frameworks assure this. I truly enjoy Cascone's work, but it has at times a classical ambient feel to it with a touch of early 90s techno minimalism. *0 and Ryoji Ikeda play with silence: but so did Cage. Richard Chartier has done some very amazing high frequency tonal work: so did the musique concrète artists. One must be careful here. I do not think microsound has necessarily created a new breed of liberated artists as it has so much created a different way—-again, a machinic assemblage, where one interacts in the creation and the reception of the music with other nonlinear components—-of interacting with sound, with its own tendrils that lead back to the roots of classical history, including rave culture, avantgardism, [Javanese] gamelan, Japanese narrative structure, African call and response, etc.

Q: The first years of rave were marked by a social culture that saw its liberty in an act of transgression via ecstasy, the illegal warehouse gathering, pirate radio, etc. which were only later co-opted by both “commodified illegality” (organized crime) and later the commodity itself (the music industry). How does/can microsound offer an alternative to the model of transgression, with its vast lineage in underground culture, in which within the primacy of the commodity a new “sense” of the aural, theoretical, and social might be constructed?

DJ Tobias: Microsound has proved a very interesting test-case in attempting to redefine, for me at least, the Temporary Autonomous Zone. The early 90s conceptions of underground rave culture, featuring break-ins and hedonism and complete underground economies, has all but fallen apart through police action, commodification, and criminalization (real or created by the police state). The energy of these events is difficult to match with avant-garde drones. However, over the past few months I have been throwing events that combine several factors: several microsound performances (including Kim Cascone and Jetone), art installations, surreal video playing in the background (Jodorowsky's Holy Mountain, for example), and DJ sets at the end of the show featuring contemporary electro and glitch/minimal house/techno. The result has been a sense of renewed energy. The first event, “Refrains,” was combined with an academic conference on the issue of the “Refrain” in relation to electronic music and social movements; the show later on, which was free, mixed together several crowds: academics, students, ravers, post-ravers, avant-garde music listeners, artists, clubbers, and art-show attendees. During the microsound performances, people sat down but weren't always sure what to do (we had no chairs, in order to leave the space smooth and ambiguous, save the bright green vinyl op-art on the floor by Trina Linde). This temporary space of indeterminacy, faced with a laptop performance, has hope for me. Kim [Cascone] notes it as well. I think this space of indeterminacy, of awkwardness, where one is not sure whether one should dance or sit or listen with eyes closed or open, this space opens a similar energy that existed in early rave culture--that there were no rules, standards, or definitions. After the microsound performances, when the DJs would come on (me being one of them), the sense of release and relief was palpable. But as we were playing what is in essence minimalist, avant-garde techno, it heightened and continued the tension, as this is not what most people normally expect (in a club and at raves the music is usually quite cheesy). At the second show, Jetone played, and people started doing different things: some sat, some began to dance weirdly and slowly (like in early ambient rooms at raves), some laid down, some even meditated. A new set of social rules and interactions were being built. Now, essentially what is being re-explored (again) is a “Happening,” in some form, a TAZ, a smooth space, whatever. The thing is, microsound is not going to potentially gather tens of thousands to occupy public land for days on end to revel in a hedonistic lifestyle, as rave culture certainly did. However, if we are seriously investigating the TAZ (which I am), it is interesting to note that Bey puts little faith in a TAZ movement which cannot stay invisible by shades or degrees. Microsound is something which, through its obscurantism, could offer a certain level of psychological autonomy—something rave culture could not offer. Once one begins to combine this with a gathering that combines the successful elements of rave culture—the hedonism, the politics—then perhaps we have something a little stronger, a little more under the radar, that could develop into a different sort of social movement.

Q: What do you anticipate is the future of electronic music and of theory and its interrelationship with music? Which artists do you feel are in the best position to articulate this future both in terms of music and also theory?

DJ Tobias: Paul Miller [DJ Spooky] is certainly one of the few; Achim Szepanski, Terre Thaemlitz, Kodwo Eshun, Hakim Bey ... but to be honest, those who are articulating the immediate situation have not yet begun to be heard. I have the deepest respect for Kim Cascone, but essentially I think the relationship he proposes—-despite the allusions to Deleuze and Guattari and rhizomatics, between man and machine—-is a humanist model of domination, in this case over the laptop, where we must control not only the machine but the genre (to "prevent entropy"). So, that said, I do not think Cascone is fully articulating the possibilities inherent in Deleuze and Guattari's radical thought in relation to music and technology.