Thursday, May 01, 2008

La Operación Colmena.



Pero él les dijo: Los reyes de las naciones

se enseñorean de ellas, y los que sobre ellas tienen

autoridad son llamados bienhechores;

más no así vosotros, sino sea mayor entre

vosotros como el más joven, y el que dirige, como el que sirve.

Porque, ¿cuál es mayor, el que se sienta a la mesa,

o el que sirve? ¿No es el que se sienta a la mesa? Mas

yo estoy entre vosotros como el que sirve.


Lucas 22:25-27 (Casiodoro de Reina, 1569).




Lumbre en el monte: La historia de Rodolfo Montiel y la lucha de los campesinos ecologistas de Guerrero

(Jimena Camacho Torres).



La lucha contra explotación descontrolada de la naturaleza es un tema que se repite constantemente en América Latina y el resto del mundo. Pese a ello, los medios de comunicación ignoran estos acontecimientos o los olvidan fácilmente. La historia de Rodolfo Montiel pretende oponerse a ese olvido y a la impunidad de quienes actúan como verdugos del medio ambiente y de quienes lo defienden.



A la memoria de Alejandro García Durán.


LA CASA CHINCHACHOMA



"No, no es extremadamente frío de acuerdo a los registros climáticos de esta región", me dice mi asesor. Tal vez así sea para un inglés, pero, a un mexicana nacido en el trópico, le parece un interminable oTOÑO. Entre las múltiples ventajas de estas "inconvenientes" condiciones atmosféricas, está la posibilidad de disfrutar una inusual fresca aura matinal. MOTeAdo de nubarrones, repetimos un fin de semana lluvioso en el sureste inglés. A ratos, la lluvia también se comporta en forma caprichosa. Las regiones ecuatoriales de todo el mundo nos muestran que por el momento, las precipitaciones dominan el panorama, mientras que en las zonas extratropicales, el agua sigue a la baja según el último reporte trimestral. Un breve regaderazo aliviará el norte de los esteits durante el puente del Labour's Day, para desafortunadamente regresar a las mismas condiciones secas. Estas mismas condiciones meteorológicas se manifestarán en la península ibérica, con excepción de ciertas areas al norte, en especial en Galicia, donde les llueve sobre mojado.


¿'On 'tá la salida de emergencia, comp@?, pregunta el sistema económico dominante. Pues por ahí donde vas, NO, contestan las economías respondonas, perdón, emergentes, que observan la loca carrera de los insensatos hacia el precipicio. Las señales son más que claras, nos dice el Bernanke, que trata de evitar a toda costa la recesión. ¡Ah, caray! ¿Pus qué no era oficial el big crunch? "It's a nightmare", nos grita un tendero del BronX. "Nombre, pus sí ya está sacando la cabecita". ¿Ah, sí?, pues eso será en las Américas, en las Europas estamos peor que jumiles en comal. "Hace un lustro que no veíamos estas condiciones económicas", dice el jefazo del Deutsche Bank. Y el Banco de Inglaterra anda por las mismas veredas, aplica una de las ya soluciones clásicas, retácalo de dineros frescos, mate; la mano invisible del mercado, ¿no? Nevermind!!! Nuestros paisas son más arrojados, porque mientras los últimos reportes muestran una disminución de las remesas desde los EUA (ni más ni menos que el segundo baluarte de la economía mexicana), los genios que controlan los dineros en México, son tan raudos como el perezoso ante el evidente peligro.


El sector energético ciertamente goza hoy de cabal salud, y seguirá mejorando, mientras (que) los consumidores sienten un agudo dolor en la entrepierna. Al mismo tiempo que nos enteramos que se cierne una amenaza alimentaria pandémica, uno de los grandes supermercados británicos muestra su obesa condición a costa de los más famélicos del Asia. En ese continente, el lejano oriente manifiesta su enojo, e insiste en protestar contra uno de los gigantes franceses; wait a minute! ¿Quién de ustedes me consigue el último reporte trimestral del desempeño comercial de Carrefour en China? ¡Ah! Si de pura chiripa lo encuentran me pueden facilitar sus contribuciones fiscales, please. Y ya que estoy de pediche, la rojilla me comentó que la Samsung representa algo así como el 30 0 40% de la economía en su país. Y como yo soy discípulo de ustedes, les ruego me confirmen el dato (no me gusta afirmar lo que no me consta, pa’ que no me lleven a la reputadísimasuprema corta), si me pueden retroalimentar con sus aportaciones (en porcentaje) al fisco se los voy a agradecer de por vida. No sean amarra-navajas; yo no les he solicitado el mismo tipo de información del grupo Carso. Alguna de estas lucrativas motivaciones debe mantener interesados a los más bisoños aspirantes a los pisos de remates de los mercados bursátiles. ¿Cuánto les toca a ustedes de toda esa bonanza, comp@s?


Cuando aún la riqueza que nosotros producimos es arrebatada nos queda el servicio. Esa fue otra lección que aprendí en 1996. Sin el apoyo del programa Solidaridad, Progresa, Oportunidades o el último creativo” membrete de este sexenio, en ese entonces los comp@s se organizaron para construir una biblioteca, y un pequeño centro de salud, con recursos limitados pero con una infinita voluntad. Los festejos del día del niño" me hicieron recordar a la mujer maravilla. Esa fémina es incansable y cuenta con un enorme espíritu de servicio. Sin necesidad de ninguna fundación pantalla hace un tiempo me pidió mi aportación voluntaria para apoyar las actividades extramuros de su iglesia. Me dijo que quería organizarles algo a los chamacos de una de las colonias apartadas a las afueras de Cuernavaca, y me pidió consejo. Como soy bien güey, le sugerí que les comprara artículos escolares (lápices, cuadernos, etc.), ella me comentó que, aunque durante uno de los festejos navideños les había sido útil, después de todo eran... Niños. Debido a que su mejor técnica de persuasión es una hermosa sonrisa, al final tuve que apoquinar para “la causa”. Me retraté en el proyecto y olvidé el asunto. No le hubiera un día preguntado cómo había gastado mi parte. ¡Utas! Me brindó un reporte de transparencia de gastos que hubiera sonrojado al personal completo de la Secretaria de la Función Pública. Tanto estiró el dinero que cubrió el transporte, la alimentación y las entradas de toda la bola de huerquillos al parque Chapultepec de la ciudad.


¿Cómo se construye el apoyo popular que mantiene vigente a un movimiento revolucionario? Esta semana veía una amena plática del Paco Nacho en Italia (se acepta como obsequio su última biografía de Doroteo). Él les narraba la anécdota de una ingeniosa manera que idearon los comp@s de la División del Norti para contrabandear municiones entre Ciudad Juárez y El Paso utilizando morrillos. Intenté evocar si en el pasado reciente hemos tenido este tipo de organización, y la terca memoria me trae a los brigadistas del '68, que fueron cobardemente asesinados por GDO, luego coptados y algunos de ellos absorbidos por LEA. Casi dos décadas después, espontáneos pero algo caóticos los comp@s salieron a la calle el 19 de Septiembre de 1985, ante el azoro del primer presidente neoliberal. El Junior Cárdenas tuvo en sus manos la oportunidad histórica de su padre, y la desperdició enviando el justificado multitudinario coraje posfraude a sus hogares. Hubo o no reunión secreta es algo hoy irrelevante. El movimiento neozapatista nos ofreció una nueva excusa para solidarizarnos (de a deveras, no el prostituido significado que se ha utilizado a partir de 1988), sólo que en ese entonces tenía una escala geográfica muy localizada. Fuera o no el candidato ideal, l@s ciudadan@s mexican@s votaron por la cabeza visible de lo que actualmente conocemos como la RCP. Muy pocos en realidad se tragaron el cuentito de que un mediocre candidato opositor había superado una ventaja más de 10 puntos porcentuales en las preferencias del electorado (creo que eso sería inédito en la historia de las campañas presidenciales limpias). El fraude electoral de 2006 motivó primero el plantón en la avenida Reforma de la capital mexicana, y un poco tiempo después la Convención Nacional Democrática. Ya no es un secreto que el objetivo del presente gobierno (o su caricatura) es seguir fielmente los dictados del consenso de Washington, a contrapelo de las tendencias mundiales. Las modificaciones al régimen de pensiones de la ley del ISSSTE no es sino un ensayo al verdadero trofeo: el petróleo mexicano. Por ello, el movimiento nacional por la defensa contra la reforma energética, que pretende entregar a empresas privadas, muchas de las atribuciones que la constitución le otorga exclusivamente al estado (traté de ser en extremo preciso pa' que no venga a corregirme la plana uno de esos intelectuales orgánicos maquinados durante el Salinato).


Las fronteras físicas no son obstáCULO para manifestar nuestro enojo contra medidas que atentan contra nuestra nación. El Domingo pasado la Taiwanesa me contaba que su papá está reteenchilado por la cobertura informativa al conflicto del Tibet. Ella y su familia han vivido durante las dos últimos décadas en Canadá, pero tiene ascendiente chino por parte de sus abuelos, por la que no han perdido ese lazo de sangre. Así que, por necesidad, debido al claramente desequilibrado y sesgado alud de noticias que se transmiten diariamente, ha tenido que buscar medios alternativos, encontrar cauces para manifestarse, e informar a sus conocidos sobre el lado desconocido del altercado en la región del Tibet. Me sigue inquietando saber qué impacto podemos tener con el apoyo de nuestros paisas que trabajan más allá de nuestra frontera norti. ¿Qué servicio son capaces de ofrecer nuestros paisas que comulgan con nuestro movimiento?


El poder ejecutivo posee el monopolio del manejo del presupuesto, producto de la riqueza que todos nosotros producimos. Por ello, no soy ingenuo hay que superar esa, en apariencia, insuperable valla. La organización celular está en su etapa temprana, y busca revertir la tóxica desinformación que difunden aquellos a quienes hemos concesionado esos espacios. En estricto sentido, con un gobierno que obedeciera nuestros mandatos, podríamos revocar las licencias de los concesionarios que no se apegaran al acuerdo previamente pactado. El siguiente frente natural consistiría en disminuir los intereses económicos que mantienen a un puñe..., perdón, puñado de hombres y mujeres gobernando al país de facto. Nuestra red no ha alcanzado la masa crítica necesaria para que el boicot económico o el comercio alternativo les haga mella alguna, de modo que los barones del dinero reflexionaran seriamente sobre la fortaleza de nuestro movimiento. Sin embargo, nada impide que el tiempo - y esfuerzo - que deberíamos dedicar a nuestros pasatiempos (en condiciones ideales son parte vital de todo ser humano), lo consagremos a "nuestra causa". Uno de mis maestros hace poco explicaba que, en los organismos complejos, la celula aislada es inútil, sin embargo, combinada con otras células forma un tejido, que sirve para a su vez formar un órgano y este un organismo, éste último es capaz de cumplir multiples funciones especializadas. Reinitas, zánganos, obreras, todos los miembros son importantes para asegurar la realeza de la jalea en la colmena. Es hora que los miembros de la RCP, ofrezcamos el trabajo comunitario que el estado ha incumplido durante los últimos 5 lustros, y que desgarró nuestro organismo. Si las células regenerativas nos abocamos a reconstruir nuestros tejidos, en un futuro no muy lejano, habremos creado la base social imprescindible para la victoria de la primera revolución pacífica del siglo XXI. Al Tiempo.



M@rChinchachOma;


Norwich, U(n) K(achiruloco);


01/05/08



… Todos somos AMLO.






PILONA EN SU TINTA :

Buenas noches, el canal 12 de la cadena allá_se_hará estrena un nuevo espacio en su estudio azul. Un escritor entrevista libremente a un colega de “profesión”. En esta ocasión en “Duelo de plumas”, M@rco Seco platica con el maestro Miguel Salmón.


_ Buenas noches, maestro.

_ ¡Qué tal! Un placer compartir el espacio con usted; especialmente porque, como lo ha de padecer usted también, no sobran micrófonos abiertos al pensamiento alternativo.

_ Así es. Se viven tiempos interesantes en el mundo, particularmente en México. ¿Qué mantiene en las calles a la gente manifestándose?

_ Una opción que ellos no escogieron. Todos aquellos que llenan el zócalo, casi seguramente están convencidos que, quién ocupa la silla presidencial, no llegó allí de manera leal, por decirlo de manera diplomática, que no es la forma de resolver las diferencias, como usted observara diariamente .

_ Desde mi parecer las ideas que usted ha intentado difundir en su programa Dominical finalmente están influyendo en el ciudadano común y corriente.

_ Gracias, pero el crédito no es mío, yo soy sólo un heraldo a su vez, de mis maestros. Parafraseando a newton, “voy apoyado sobre hombros de gigantes”. Eso, en primer lugar. Después deberíamos considerar que la palabra ciudadano lleva una fuerte carga de significación; en la antigüedad el ciudadano politizado adquiría todo un cúmulo de responsabilidades, que difícilmente aceptaría un habitante de nuestro país.

_ La organización celular es evidente.

_ Sí, pero la etapa que observamos es apenas embrionaria, incapaz todavía de cambiar el curso de la historia de México.

_ ¿Qué haría falta para lograr este cambio?

_ He escrito profusamente sobre el tema. Pero, por el momento siendo un mucho reductivo, son necesarios tanto el conocimiento científico como la autocrítica. Hay un ejemplo perfecto a la mano. Si previo a la elección del 2006, se hubiera tenido a la gente organizada en células autogestionarias, lo que el movimiento pacífico llama fraude hubiera sido muy complicado de vender, aún al más escéptico. Ahora, después de la elección, varios expertos universitarios recopilaron suficientes pruebas que no debieron haberse subestimado. De cualquier manera, es honesto reconocer que se ha enmendado el camino, y si ha plantado la semilla, el abono idóneo para su sano crecimiento es la autocrítica, que puede mantener al movimiento vigente.

_ Por el bien de México deseo que su palabras sean de profeta. Buenas noches, gracias por compartir el espacio.

_ El gusto es mío, por permitirme expresar estas ideas por las que he luchado tantos años, yo también espero que el cambio sea histórico, y no sólo coyuntural. Buenas noches a todos.



SITIO INTERNÉ DE LA SEMANA:


Socialist Review.

http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/



SPECIAL REQUESTS:


Oigan, no sean, ya concedánle una columna semanal al Krusty, perdón, Krauze; me lo van a traumar al “pobrecito”.




¡Hey! ¿Les parece aplicarle la táctica Lewinsky al de Los Pinos? ¿No, verdad? ¿Y al del palacio de Covián? Ora, pues; yo nomás decía.





ENCORE MOTOROLO:












By Cahal Milmo
Wednesday, 30 April 2008


The price of power and who foots the bill for Britain's rocketing energy costs took centre stage yesterday as the oil giants Shell and BP unveiled huge combined profits of £7.2bn, made in just three months, and consumers were hit with a new round of steep rises in prices from gas and electricity to air travel.


Npower, Britain's fourth largest domestic power supplier, signalled the start of what experts said will be another round of price increases in gas and electricity after it abolished its cheapest online dual fuel tariff and raised charges for new internet customers by up to 20 per cent. Industry analysts expect all energy bills to rise by another 20 to 25 per cent by next spring, pushing another one million Britons into fuel poverty.

The hike was just one of several being absorbed by consumers yesterday, ranging from an increase of up to £30 per return flight in the fuel surcharge paid by British Airways' passengers, to petrol pump prices now averaging 109p per litre of unleaded fuel. One forecourt in Kent was charging 129p per litre.





Amid a row about the "extreme" size of the first-quarter profits announced by BP and Shell, which exceeded City expectations, Gordon Brown called on the oil companies to invest more in increasing production in the North Sea. The Prime Minister admitted he was "very worried" about the impact of rising oil prices on pensioners and families, as opposition politicians pointed to the growing disparity between corporate profits and the financial squeeze being felt by households.

Sarah Teather, the Liberal Democrat business spokeswoman said: "Many people will feel deeply uncomfortable that some of the world's wealthiest companies are experiencing a profit surge at a time when household budgets are under tremendous pressure.

"Consumers are already facing huge price hikes in food and utility bills. Now petrol prices seem to be rising, while oil companies' profits are going sky-high.

Oil companies should not be profiteering while so many are struggling to make ends meet. We need to ask whether the price rises being passed on to consumers are proportionate."

The first rumblings of popular discontent were felt on the streets of London yesterday when some 250 hauliers staged a noisy protest against record diesel prices which they said could drive them out of business.

Pump prices are expected to continue to rise, despite the return to work yesterday by staff at the Grangemouth oil refinery, where strike action over a pensions dispute was blamed for helping to push crude oil prices to just under $120 (£60) a barrel. It could take as much as three weeks before the refinery is restored to full production.

A cavalcade of HGV's paraded along Park Lane with their horns blaring. The haulage industry wants the 2p increase in fuel duty planned for October to be deferred and a fuel duty regulator to be appointed with the power to reduce the Government's income from petrol and diesel sales when oil prices rise.

Motoring lobbyists estimate the Treasury is making an extra £123m a month more than it was a year ago in VAT on fuel sales. Edmund King, president of the AA, said: "The motorist feels somewhat battered from all sides, seeing the oil companies going off with cash in their pockets and the Treasury filling its coffers. It's the ordinary motorist that's bearing the brunt of this."

BA said its decision to increase its fuel surcharges for the third time in less than six months "reflects continuing oil prices". The troubled airline's finance director warned last month that it would become unprofitable if oil prices remained at "just under $120 a barrel". Opec warned this week that prices could reach $200 by the end of this year.

For their part, the oil companies insisted their dramatic rise in profits was because of the near doubling of the price they received for a barrel of oil during the past year and not from their forecourt sales. The two said they already pay high taxes to the Treasury and blamed the high price of crude on financial speculators. Between them, Shell and BP pumped profits of more than £3m an hour in the first three months of 2008 with Shell recording a 12 per cent rise to £3.92bn and BP improving by 48 per cent to £3.32bn.

The Prime Minister said he recognised the impact that Britain's economic problems were having and pledged help for families and pensioners. He told GMTV: "We have got this credit crunch, we have got food prices rising, we have got fuel prices rising. I feel very worried about the effect of that on ordinary hard-working families and on pensioners."

The trend for passing on increasing fuel costs to consumers was continued by Npower, which has 6.8 million customers, when it withdrew its cheapest gas and electricity product available online. The replacement tariff is between 10 and 20 per cent more expensive depending on location. The company declined to comment, insisting it had no immediate plans for further price rises.

Analysts have been predicting that big gas and electricity suppliers will find it hard to resist offsetting their costs with higher fuel bills, meaning an average household bill could rise by up to £190 over the next 12 months. Such an increase would raise the number of Britons in fuel poverty – defined as needing to spend 10 per cent or more of income on energy – to about 5.5 million people.

Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Stress, hooding, noise, nudity, dogs


It was the young officials at Guantánamo who dreamed up a list of new aggressive interrogation techniques, inspired by Jack Bauer from the TV series, 24. But it was the politicians and lawyers in Washington who set the ball rolling. Philippe Sands follows the torture trail right to the top


# Philippe Sands
# The Guardian,
# Saturday April 19 2008

On Tuesday, December 2 2002, Donald Rumsfeld signed a piece of paper that changed the course of history. That same day, President Bush signed a bill to put the Pentagon in funds for the next year. The US faced unprecedented challenges, Bush told a large and enthusiastic audience, and terror was one of them. The US would respond to these challenges, and it would do so in the "finest traditions of valour". And then he signed a large increase in the defence budget.

Elsewhere in the Pentagon, an event took place for which there was no comment, no fanfare. With a signature and a few scrawled words, Rumsfeld reneged on the tradition of valour to which Bush had referred. Principles for the conduct of interrogation, dating back more than a century to President Lincoln's famous instruction of 1863 that "military necessity does not admit of cruelty", were discarded. He approved new and aggressive interrogation techniques that would produce devastating consequences.

The document had been drafted a few days earlier by the general counsel at the Defence Department, William J Haynes II (known as Jim Haynes), Rumsfeld's most senior lawyer. The Haynes memo was addressed to Rumsfeld and copied to two colleagues: General Richard Myers, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and the most senior military official in the US, and Doug Feith, under-secretary of defence for policy and number three at the department.

Attached to the memorandum were four short documents. The first was a legal opinion written by Lieutenant Colonel Diane Beaver, a staff judge advocate at Guantánamo. The second, a request for approval of new methods of interrogating detainees from Beaver's boss, Major General Mike Dunlavey, the army's head of interrogation at Guantánamo. The third was a memorandum on similar lines from General Tom Hill, commander of US Southern Command (Southcom, covering Central and South America). Last, and most important, was a list of 18 techniques of interrogation, set out in a three-page memorandum.

These techniques were new to the military. Category I comprised two techniques, yelling and deception. Category II included 12 techniques, aiming at humiliation and sensory deprivation, including stress positions, such as standing for a maximum of four hours; isolation; deprivation of light and sound; hooding; removal of religious and all other comfort items; removal of clothing; forced grooming, such as shaving of facial hair; and the use of individual phobias, such as fear of dogs, to induce stress.

Finally came Category III. These methods were to be used for only a very small percentage of detainees - the most uncooperative (said to be fewer than 3%) and exceptionally resistant individuals - and required approval by the commanding general at Guantánamo. In this category were four techniques: the use of "mild, non-injurious physical contact", such as grabbing, poking and light pushing; the use of scenarios designed to convince the detainee that death or severely painful consequences were imminent for him or his family; exposure to cold weather or water; and, finally, the use of a wet towel and dripping water to induce the misperception of suffocation. This last technique came to be known as water-boarding, described on a chat show by the vice-president, Dick Cheney, as a "dunk in the water" and a "no-brainer" if it could save lives.

The Haynes memo recommended "blanket approval" of 15 of the 18 techniques, including just one of the four techniques listed in Category III: mild, non-injurious physical contact. However, he did not reject the others, nor did he advise that they were contrary to the Geneva conventions. Rumsfeld signed his name next to the word "Approved", and added his comment at the bottom of the page: "I stand for eight to 10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to four hours?"

The techniques were devised with at least one specific detainee in mind. Detainee 063 had been refused entry to the US just before 9/11 and captured in Afghanistan in November 2001. In January 2002 he joined the first captives to be transported to Guantánamo, one of a group labelled by the administration as "the worst of the worst". "The faster we can interrogate these people and identify them, and get what they have in them out of them, in as graceful a way as is possible," Rumsfeld said, "we have a better chance of saving some people's lives."

When the Haynes memo reached Guantánamo on December 2, Detainee 063 was in an isolated, plywood interrogation booth at Camp X-Ray. He was bolted to the floor and secured to a chair, his hands and legs cuffed. He had been held in isolation since August 8, nearly four months earlier. He was dehydrated and in need of regular hook-ups to an intravenous drip. His feet were swollen. He was urinating on himself.

During Detainee 063's first few months at Guantánamo, the interrogators had followed established practices for military and law enforcement interrogations. Building rapport is the overriding aim of the US Army Field Manual 34-52, the rule book for military interrogators, colloquially referred to as "FM 34-52". Legality was also essential, which meant operating in accordance with the rules set out in the US military's Uniform Code of Military Justice and international law, in particular the four Geneva conventions.

At the heart of them lies "Common Article 3", which expressly prohibits cruel treatment and torture, as well as "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment". Tactics that had conformed to these principles changed dramatically. The interrogation log describes what happened immediately after Rumsfeld signed the Haynes memo.

The pattern was always the same: 20-hour interrogation sessions, followed by four hours of sleep. Sleep deprivation appears as a central theme, along with stress positions and constant humiliation, including sexual humiliation. These techniques were supplemented by the use of water, regular bouts of dehydration, the use of IV tubes, loud noise (the music of Christina Aguilera was blasted out in the first days of the new regime), nudity, female contact, pin-ups. An interrogator even tied a leash to him, led him around the room and forced him to perform a series of dog tricks. He was forced to wear a woman's bra and a thong was placed on his head.

Rumsfeld led the charge for war in Iraq; in part he did so because of Saddam Hussein's contempt for human life. "Torture is systematic in Iraq, and the most senior officials in the regime are involved," Rumsfeld said, a few months before Saddam was overthrown. "Electric shock, eye gouging, acid baths, lengthy confinement in small metal boxes are only some of the crimes committed by this regime." He spoke those words one day after secretly signing the Haynes memo and approving his own techniques of aggressive interrogation at Guantánamo.

Ironically, it was the Iraq war - in particular, events at Abu Ghraib prison - that brought the Haynes memo into the open two years later. By the autumn of 2003, Abu Ghraib was being run by the US as a detention facility. On April 28 2004, a CBS television report revealed the nature and scale of abuse being inflicted upon Iraqi prisoners. Photographs taken by US military participants were published, including one, now notorious, showing a prisoner standing on a box with his head covered and wires attached to his fingers. Another showed Private Lynndie England holding a leash tied to the neck of a naked man on the floor.

Was there a connection between the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the Bush administration's secret interrogation policies at other places, including Guantánamo? In June 2004, President Bush, hosting the G8 summit in Savannah, Georgia, was asked by the media if he had authorised any kind of interrogation techniques necessary to pursue the "war on terror"? No, he said, his authorisation was that anything the US did would conform to US law and be consistent with international treaty obligations. "We're a nation of law. We adhere to laws. We have laws on the books."

Four days later, the administration unexpectedly declassified and released a number of documents relating to interrogation in the belief that this would reflect the thorough process of deliberation that, it was claimed, took place, and demonstrate a commitment to the rule of law. At the briefing, conducted by three lawyers from Bush's inner circle, Alberto Gonzales, the president's counsel, Jim Haynes from the Defence Department, and his deputy, Dan Dell'Orto, it was made clear that particular documents were crucial: the Haynes memo, and a decision taken a few months previously by the president, on February 7 2002, that none of the detainees at Guantánamo, whether Taliban or al-Qaida, could rely on any of the protections granted by the Geneva conventions, not even Common Article 3.

The second set of documents were legal opinions issued on August 1 2002. One of these, by two senior lawyers at the Justice Department, concluded that physical torture occurred only when the pain was "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily functions, or even death". Mental torture required "lasting psychological harm". The memo concluded that torture of suspected terrorists under interrogation would not be unlawful if it could be justified on grounds of necessity or self-defence.

On October 11 2002, Guantánamo had request that additional techniques beyond those in FM 34-52 be approved for use against high-value detainees, in particular a Saudi Arabian, Mohammed al-Qahtani - otherwise known as Detainee 063. The underlying message of the briefing was spelled out: Rumsfeld had merely responded to a request from Guantánamo, and in doing so had acted reasonably. By contrast, the abuses at Abu Ghraib were unauthorised and unconnected to actual policies.

Much later, in March 2006, Time magazine published on its website the interrogation log of Detainee 063. Some of the Abu Ghraib images bore a resemblance to what Detainee 063 had been through: humiliation, stress, hooding, nudity, female interrogators, shackles, dogs. Was this just a coincidence?

A few days after the president made his decision that the detainees were not covered by the Geneva conventions, Rumsfeld appointed the head of military interrogations at Guantánamo - Major General Michael E Dunlavey, a reservist, in civilian life a judge in Erie, Pennsylvania. Rumsfeld told Dunlavey to report directly to him on a weekly basis, bypassing the usual chain of command. When we met, I asked Dunlavey about the mission Rumsfeld gave him. He paused. "He wanted me to maximise the information. He wanted me to identify who was there and get the intelligence, to prevent the next 9/11."

When Dunlavey arrived at Guantánamo, "plane loads" of detainees were being delivered on a daily basis. Many posed no threat; some were very elderly; others posed a serious threat. The focus of attention soon shifted to Mohammed al-Qahtani. Dunlavey had no doubts about his identity or the threat he posed: al-Qahtani was the 20th hijacker on September 11. (How many "20th hijackers" are there, I asked, alluding to Zacarias Moussaoui, who'd recently been convicted. Dunlavey smiled.) "This guy may have been the key to the survival of the US," he told me. By August, Dunlavey was clear that the rule book FM 34-52 was too restricting for someone like al-Qahtani, who was trained to resist interrogation. In his memo of October 11 2002 he set out the key facts as he saw them. The usefulness of the existing techniques had been exhausted. Some detainees had more information. He requested that aggressive new techniques be approved.

Dunlavey told me that at the end of September a group of the most senior Washington lawyers visited Guantánamo, including David Addington, the vice president's lawyer, Gonzales and Haynes. "They brought ideas with them which had been given from sources in DC." When the new techniques were more or less finalised, Dunlavey needed them to be approved by Lieutenant Colonel Diane Beaver, his staff judge advocate in Guantánamo. "We had talked and talked, brainstormed, then we drew up a list," he said. The list was passed on to Diane Beaver."

Apart from Beaver's legal input, no one else seemed to have provided any detailed legal advice on the new techniques. It seemed strange that on so important a decision the legal advice of a relatively junior lawyer, with limited experience of these issues, could be definitive. Several months passed before I met Beaver. By then, like Dunlavey, she was being sued in American courts, although the cases were later dropped.

Beaver told me she arrived in Guantánamo in June 2002. In September that year there was a series of brainstorming meetings, some of which were led by Beaver, to gather possible new interrogation techniques. Ideas came from all over the place, she said. Discussion was wide-ranging. Beaver mentioned one source that I didn't immediately follow up with her: "24 - Jack Bauer."

It was only when I got home that I realised she was referring to the main character in Fox's hugely popular TV series, 24. Bauer is a fictitious member of the Counter Terrorism Unit in LA who helped to prevent many terror attacks on the US; for him, torture and even killing are justifiable means to achieve the desired result. Just about every episode had a torture scene in which aggressive techniques of interrogations were used to obtain information.

Jack Bauer had many friends at Guantánamo Bay, Beaver said, "he gave people lots of ideas." She believed the series contributed to an environment in which those at Guantánamo were encouraged to see themselves as being on the frontline - and to go further than they otherwise might.

Under Beaver's guidance, a list of ideas slowly emerged. Potential techniques included taking the detainees out of their usual environment, so they didn't know where they were or where they were going; the use of hoods and goggles; the use of sexual tension, which was "culturally taboo, disrespectful, humiliating and potentially unexpected"; creating psychological drama. Beaver recalled that smothering was thought to be particularly effective, and that Dunlavey, who'd been in Vietnam, was in favour because he knew it worked.

The younger men would get particularly agitated, excited even: "You could almost see their dicks getting hard as they got new ideas." A wan smile crossed Beaver's face. "And I said to myself, you know what, I don't have a dick to get hard. I can stay detached."

Beaver confirmed what Dunlavey had told me, that a delegation of senior lawyers came down to Guantánamo well before the list of techniques was sent up to Washington. They talked to the intelligence people, they even watched some interrogations. The message from the visitors was that they should do "whatever needed to be done", meaning a green light from the very top - from the lawyers for Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the CIA.

By the first week of October, the list of 18 techniques was more or less completed and it fell to Beaver to provide the legal sign-off. She was conscious of her relatively lowly position - "the dirt on the ground", as she put it, too self-deprecatingly - but also acutely aware of the time constraints, the pressures. Relations with Dunlavey were now very tense. It was rumoured that Dunlavey was leaving, that he'd become paranoid, lost the plot. She tried getting help from more senior lawyers in Florida and Washington, but got nowhere. So she ploughed on alone, proceeding methodically through the 18 techniques. Each was tested against the standards set by US law, namely, the Eighth Amendment of the constitution (which prohibited "cruel and unusual punishments"), the federal Torture Statute, and the military law of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Her standard was elastic. The federal Torture Statute, she wrote, would not be violated so long as none of the proposed techniques was "specifically intended to cause severe physical pain or suffering or prolonged mental harm". Legality was thus boiled down to intent.

The techniques were justified because there was "a legitimate governmental objective in obtaining the information for the protection of the national security of the United States". The ends always justified the means. Rumsfeld had described the detainees as "the worst of the worst"; Beaver herself had unambiguous views about some of them. "Psychopaths," she told me. "Skinny, runty, dangerous, lying psychopaths."

Beaver explained what she had tried to do, and her sense of shock about the way in which her advice was made public. "They gave me an hour's notice, no warning, no preparation." They left her name on the advice when they released it; Haynes could have blacked it out but didn't. She took the flak and the lawsuits personally.

General James T Hill visited Guantánamo a week before he took over command of Southcom in August 2002. He had not closely followed all the comings and goings over new interrogation techniques, but he had become increasingly concerned about a "dysfunctional" command leadership. He worried that the full intelligence value of the detainees may not be fully exploited. He was also concerned that the interrogators hadn't been properly trained. "They were just kind of swimming by themselves," he said. However, he was not happy about the suggestion from the Pentagon that he should be the one to approve the new techniques. "I said no, no, no. This is way too important to leave at our level." He pushed the decision back to Washington.

Hill's memo reached General Dick Myers, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, the most senior person in the US armed forces, on October 25 2002. "There was a sense of urgency that in my 40 years of military experience hadn't existed in other contingencies," he explained when we met. There was the real fear that one of the detainees may know when the next attack would happen, and that they would miss vital information.

The first big decision was Geneva. For historic, cultural and training reasons, Myers insisted that the Geneva conventions should apply, even to a rogue, lawless actor such as al-Qaida. It became clear to me that Myers was a little confused about the decision that was actually taken. He claimed to be satisfied with the president's decision of February 7 2002. "After all the arguments were done, the decision was, we don't think it applies in a technical sense, but we're going to behave as if it does." That wasn't what the president decided.

The actual decision distinguished between the Taliban - to whom Geneva applied, although detainees could not invoke rights under it because they were not wearing uniforms or insignia - and al-Qaida, to whom it didn't apply at all because they were not a state. Had Myers understood what had been decided? Did he appreciate the consequences for interrogation techniques? If the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff was confused, then inevitably soldiers in the field would also be confused. As one seasoned observer of military affairs put it to me, Myers was "well and truly hoodwinked".

So what did Myers think about the new techniques? "We thought, OK, all the techniques came out of the book, there weren't any techniques invented." I stopped him.

"Out of which book?" I asked.

"Out of 34-52," he replied. "I think all of these are in the manual." They were not - not one of them. "They aren't?" he asked, surprised. Not only that, but most of them violated Geneva's Common Article 3. Such an answer from the chairman of the joint chiefs surprised me.

As we worked through the list of techniques, Myers became increasingly hesitant and troubled. At forced grooming and dogs he became defensive. "Dogs were only to be present, never to be..." his words tailed off. "When you see this, you say, holy mackerel," he exclaimed. "We never authorised torture, we just didn't. Not what we would do." Little by little, my understanding of Myers's role was becoming more focused. He hadn't pushed for these new techniques, but he didn't resist them, either. He didn't inquire too deeply.

With Rumsfeld's verbal approval and Haynes's support, the interrogation of al-Qahtani began. The interrogation log for November 23 2002 recorded the first moment. "The detainee arrives at the interrogation booth at Camp X-Ray. His hood is removed and he is bolted to the floor."

Meanwhile alarm bells were ringing with the FBI. One of the FBI's behavioural psychologists called headquarters in Washington. Concerns were raised by an FBI special agent who arrived to find al-Qahtani already "incarcerated in a darkened cell in the naval Brig". He was interrogated by the FBI, and the plan was for military personnel to continue for 24 hours straight. The FBI agent objected, but was told that this technique was approved by "the Secretary", meaning Rumsfeld.

The agent described how "the reservists yelled and screamed" at al-Qahtani, and "a German shepherd was positioned at the door of the interrogation hut and made to growl and bark at the detainee". At one point, a copy of the Qur'an was placed in front of al-Qahtani while he was handcuffed to a chair, and an interrogator "straddled the Qur'an". The detainee became very angry, but still refused to provide any information.

The FBI agent was not the only one with concerns. Mike Gelles, a clinical forensic psychologist, had worked since 1990 for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, the primary law enforcement and intelligence arm of the US Navy. He first visited Guantánamo in February 2002, and had concerns from the outset.

By June, the numbers at Guantánamo had grown to more than 500 detainees and interrogations were underway. Were they getting any useful information? The expression on Gelles's face suggested not. Even assuming that they had the right people, nobody discovered what they knew. "I remember being down in Camp X-Ray and wandering around," Gelles recalled, "and seeing a couple of very psychotic folks, and thinking, 'What's going on here, why would you fly a guy who's flagrantly psychotic from Afghanistan to Guantánamo Bay?' It didn't make any sense." Gelles thought that Beaver had tried to rein in some of the greater excesses. "She tried to cool it, but basically she was so immersed and so lost..." Gelles' words trailed off. "She drank the Kool-Aid."

His chief doubts were that the new techniques would produce "unreliable information" - unusable in any court case against al-Qahtani - that they were immoral and they'd "set a pattern that was clearly going to impact our folks overseas when they were captured".

It was because of sustained pressure from dissenters at Guantánamo, such as Gelles and the FBI agent, and in particular Alberto Mora, the navy's top counsel at the Pentagon, that Rumsfeld rescinded the new interrogation techniques on January 15 2003. Subsequently a working group was set up; it approved a revised set of interrogation techniques, which were less harsh than those rescinded but which nevertheless contributed to a climate that was tolerant of abuse.

After 54 days of interrogation using the new aggressive techniques, what information did al-Qahtani give up? In June 2004, Gonzales, Haynes and Dell'Orto told the assembled media that the new techniques had worked and America was a safer place: al-Qahtani had admitted he had met Osama bin Laden, that he knew one of the 9/11 pilots, and had been sent to the US by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. It was also claimed that he had provided detailed information about a number of key people, including José Padilla, the dirty bomber, and Richard Reid, the British shoe bomber. No details were given to support these assertions.

On the face of it, al-Qahtani's interrogation log provided little support for any of these claims. (Nonetheless, he faces trial on terrorism charges at a military commission - possibly later this year.)

At the time al-Qahtani's aggressive interrogation began, Cal Temple, a Defence Department intelligence expert, was in charge of an exploitation team created to support interrogations at Guantánamo. Had the pressure from the Pentagon produced anything useful? A measured and thoughtful man, Temple chose his words with care, indicating a negative response to my question. "There was a lot of data of interest," he said. "It was contextual in nature, confirming in nature. Did it help us catch Osama bin Laden? No."

In that same June 2004 press briefing, Gonzales and Haynes went to great lengths to crush any suggestion of a connection between Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. The facts, however, suggest that there was a link between the two places, and that the Haynes memo had a malign influence over time and distance.

One army investigator compared the treatment of al-Qahtani to that displayed so graphically in the Abu Ghraib photos. "Here's this guy manacled, chained down, dogs brought in, put [in] his face, told to growl, show teeth," he said of al-Qahtani, "If you had a camera and snapped that picture, you'd be back to Abu Ghraib."

In August 2003, General Miller made a trip from Guantánamo, where he had taken over as commander from Dunlavey, to Baghdad. He was accompanied by Diane Beaver. They visited Abu Ghraib and found shocking conditions of near-lawlessness. Miller made recommendations to General Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of Coalition Ground Forces in Iraq, to codify and develop proper interrogation techniques. Within two weeks, on September 14 2003, Sanchez signed a memorandum authorising new techniques that plainly violated the Geneva Conventions, and that were similar to those included in the Haynes memo, including environmental manipulation (temperature adjustment), the presence of military dogs, sleep management (four hours' sleep per 24-hour period) and stress positions. These would have been very familiar to al-Qahtani. The photographic evidence showed abuse beginning at Abu Ghraib on October 17 - one month later.

In August 2006, the Pentagon inspector general released his own damning report. This concluded unequivocally that interrogation techniques had migrated to Iraq because operations personnel believed traditional techniques were no longer effective for all detainees. The clear conclusions from the various reports - three in three years - reinforced what Gelles told me about "force drift", the situation where interrogators come to believe that if some force is good, then more will be even better. "If you let slip the dogs, they will run," was the way a former Defence Department official put it. And so they did, from Guantánamo, to Baghdad, to Basra.

A group of British soldiers were charged with allowing or participating in the abuse of Iraqi detainees in Basra in September 2003. The detainees there had been subjected to conditioning processes to prepare them for interrogation, involving "maintaining a stress position and deprivation of sleep whilst hooded and cuffed". One of the detainees died. At least one of the techniques (sleep deprivation) had been approved by Sanchez on September 14, just days after Miller's visit. Colonel Jorge Mendonca, the most senior officer charged, argued that he was advised that sleep deprivation, stress positions and other conditioning processes had been cleared by the chain of command. The Court Martial Board accepted this defence and dismissed the charges.

But the climate was changing. In June 2006, the Supreme Court overturned President Bush's decision on Geneva, ruling it to be unlawful. The court confirmed that Common Article 3 applied to all Guantánamo detainees. It was as simple as that. Whether they were Taliban or al-Qaida, every one of the detainees had rights under Common Article 3 - and that included Mohammed al-Qahtani.

The majority opinion, reaffirming the "minimal protection" offered by Common Article 3, was written by Justice John Paul Stevens. One of the Justices went even further: Common Article 3 was part of the law of war and of a treaty that the US had ratified. "By Act of Congress," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote pointedly, "violations of Common Article 3 are considered 'war crimes', punishable as federal offences, when committed by or against United States nationals and military personnel."

Justice Kennedy's remark put the issue of war crimes on the American political agenda. Individuals who had contributed to a violation of Common Article 3 would know that they were at risk of criminal investigation and prosecution. Even more ominously, it underscored the risk of being investigated outside the US.

Parties to the international Torture Convention are required to investigate any person who is alleged to have committed torture. If appropriate, they must then prosecute - or extradite the person to a place where he will be prosecuted. The Torture Convention is also more explicit than Geneva in that it criminalises any act that constitutes complicity or participation in torture. Complicity or participation could certainly be extended not only to the politicians and but also the lawyers involved in the condoning of the 18 techniques. After all, the scheme applied to al-Qahtani was devised by lawyers, reviewed by lawyers, overseen by lawyers.
Interrogation Log of Detainee 063

Day 25, December 17 2002

0120: Control shows detainee photos from a fitness magazine of scantily-clad women.

1400: Detainee was shown 9/11 tribute videos.

2100: Detainee did not appreciate being called a homosexual. He also appeared annoyed by the issue of his mother and sister as examples of prostitutes and whores.

Day 27

1100: Happy Mohammed mask placed on detainee and he was yelled at when he tried to speak.

2320: He attempts to resist female contact. He attempts to pray as she spoke in his ear about his continuous lies...

1940: Sgt M had shown detainee a picture of Mecca, there were thousands of Muslims congregated... Detainee broke down and cried.

Day 28

1115: Told detainee that a dog is held in higher esteem because dogs know right from wrong. Began teaching the detainee lessons such as stay, come, and bark... Detainee very agitated.

1300: A towel was placed on the detainee's head like a burka, with his face exposed, and the interrogator proceeded to give him dance lessons.

2200: The detainee was strip-searched. After five minutes of nudity, the detainee ceased to resist...

Day 29

2103: ...I was forehead to forehead with the detainee and he stated that he would rather be beaten with electrical wire than have me constantly in his personal space...

Day 31

0100: ... lead (interrogator) hung pictures of swimsuit models around his neck.

Day 32

1145: Detainee refused water so control poured a little on his head.

2100: Detainee seems to be on the verge of breaking.

Day 33

0300: Detainee started falling asleep so interrogator had detainee stand up for 30 minutes. Detainee was subjected to white noise (music) waiting for his IVs to be completed.

Day 50

0230: Source received haircut... Detainee stated he would talk about anything if his beard was left alone. Beard was shaven... detainee began to cry when talking.

· Excerpted from a daily log

· This is an edited extract from Torture Team: Deception, Cruelty And The Compromise Of Law, by Philippe Sands, published on May 1 by Allen Lane at £20. To order a copy for £18, including UK mainland p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0870.

· This article was amended on Friday April 25 2008. The headline 'Stress hooding noise nudity dogs' needed some commas. This has been corrected.

We like our Venuses young




When Annie Leibovitz's picture of child star Miley Cyrus appeared in Vanity Fair her tween fans - and their parents - went ballistic. The naked back, the satin sheet, the damp hair ... how dare the innocent heroine of the hit series Hannah Montana look so provocative? Germaine Greer dissects the image itself, and we look at the people behind it: the photographer, Annie Leibovitz, and Disney, which markets the billion-dollar actor

Germaine Greer
Wednesday April 30, 2008

Guardian

When Miley Cyrus was asked about the picture of herself clutching a satin sheet to her chest that Annie Leibovitz has taken for the current issue of Vanity Fair, she said it looked "pretty and natural" and that she thought it was "really artsy". If by this she meant artistic, rather than artsy-fartsy, she was right on the money. In western art most of the women portrayed semi-clad or totally nude are children. Their nipples are pallid and undeveloped, their breasts hard and veinless, their pubes unfurred. When Lucian Freud paints girl children, nobody cares; when Leibovitz photographs them, everyone goes ballistic. When Botticelli paints the yet-to-be-enjoyed goddess of love emerging from the sea, people come from all over the world to gape at her. The Greeks and Romans liked their goddesses meaty; our preferred Venuses are children. Hardy perennials such as Diane de Poitiers held their sway as long as they did because their bodies never matured.

Kate Moss has been able to earn millions only as long as she could continue to project the body image of a 13-year-old. The appeal of her nude portraits derives from the heart-breaking curve of her narrow hip-line and the tautness of her barely perceptible cleavage, not to mention the sulky innocence of her unfocused gaze. The icon of the 34-year-old mother qua 13-year-old virgin is even more disturbing than the sexy image of the 15-year-old Cyrus, because it is so much rarer and weirder. Sexually knowing 15-year-olds are normal. No matter how much energy Disney - which makes the TV show Hannah Montana, in which Cyrus stars - might put into denying the obvious, 15-year-olds are sexually aware. Any schoolteacher coping with a heaving mass of 15-year-old women knows that whatever their tribal culture or their religious affiliation, they are fascinated by sex. Girls' magazines pay lip service to health and friendship issues: their real subject is boys.

We train female children to be manipulative and to exploit their sex. From the time she is tiny, a girl in our society is taught to flirt. She is usually dressed like a mini-whore in pink and tinsel, short skirt, matching knickers, baby-doll pyjamas, long hair falling over her face. She learns to court attention and, when successful, to hide her face. If she's lucky enough to get to be a big sister she might get over this sleazy conditioning, but very few daughters these days get to grow out of being "daddy's girl". When the time comes she is likely to reject approaching womanhood, desperate to keep her thighs skinny, and nearly as desperate to acquire hard, high breasts. The idea of growing into her own body is charmless, frightening. One thing we know about the Leibovitz photograph is that Cyrus saw nothing amiss in clutching a satin sheet to her apparently naked bosom, and looking at the camera over her shoulder. Girls are taught to look at the world in that sidelong fashion from the time they come to consciousness.






For her photograph of the teenage celebrity, Leibovitz chose a palette strongly redolent of the dirty postcards of yesteryear, sepia embittered with black, a suggestion of eye-blue and lip-red, as if retouched by hand, with never - thank our stars - a hint of pink. The light is centred on the child's sallow, unformed cheek. Her eyes are shadowed and puffy, her lips slightly set, as if she is waiting out the slow shutter-click of an obsolete camera. Nobody has run a comb through her disordered mass of dark hair, which seems greasy and damp, as if with sweat. As one of her now ex-fans shrieked in his blog, "She looked like she is freshly f**ked in these photos!" The subject of Leibovitz's photo could be a child prostitute from Casablanca, vintage 1900, the camera in the hands of a sex tourist who is about to toss a few coins to the doorkeeper. It is Disney, after all, that is merchandising this child, and the suggestion of pimping will cling to it. Leibovitz may be cynical, is obviously cynical. She is also, as usual, justified.

Now Disney accuses Vanity Fair of drumming up controversy and deliberately manipulating a 15-year-old in order to sell magazines, as if its own motives were not identical. The photo shoot for Vanity Fair was probably carried out weeks ago but the brouhaha has been timed for the very day the magazine appeared on the newsstands. Disney could have refused to make its star available for a shoot with Vanity Fair, or, if what it wanted was to protect its brand image, it could have demanded the right to vet the pictures. Cyrus was not undefended in the clutches of Leibovitz; her parents and minders were present and apparently saw nothing amiss in the offending photograph, which, in its original state, probably looked less like a dirty postcard than it does on the pages of Vanity Fair.

Before Leibovitz, Cyrus was regularly photographed on red carpets dressed as a 35-year-old in sequins and chiffon with heavy makeup, hair extensions, fuck-me shoes, and occasionally a segment of baby breast escaping at an ill-cut armhole. Otherwise she dresses as a schoolgirl in long socks, very short skirts and the same hanks of rather gluey-looking hair. These publicity shots are far cheaper and far nastier in implication than the Leibovitz image, which has class. Meanwhile, in a series of candid snapshots apparently of Cyrus that have found their way on to the internet, Cyrus the professional virgin is apparently happy to show herself nipples akimbo in jersey underwear, pulling down a vest to display a green bra, and disporting a bare belly on a bed with a boyfriend. All tacky, all in circulation, and all displaying the usual knowingness.

Cyrus said that Leibovitz didn't photograph her "in a skanky way". That she can be relied on to do for herself. Prostitution is the paradigm of service industry. It is the tragedy of Cyrus's life that she has nothing to sell but herself and she is fast approaching her sell-by date. From this time forward her price can only go down.

Branded for life
How the tweens became an advertiser's dream

With their unbeatable combination of "pester power" and burgeoning brand awareness, tweens are the advertiser's dream. Aged between six and 12, American tweens spend $51bn of their own pocket money annually - mainly on never-ending TV spin-off products, collectables, so-called multi-platform opportunities (video games, live shows, downloads, clothing). And, as if that wasn't enough tacky plastic stuff, an additional $170bn is spent on them by friends and family. It is thanks to these tween spenders that Miley Cyrus, star of Hannah Montana - up there with High School Musical as one of Disney's biggest money-spinners - is set to be worth $1bn by the time she's 18.

Part of the phenomenon is so-called "age compression" - kids getting older younger - and rejecting traditional toys as unsophisticated. The falling birth rate is significant, too, along with the rise in parental working hours: a lot of the tween market is guilt money.

The company that appears to have the best understanding of the tween market is Disney. In 2006, High School Musical, the soundtrack to the Disney Channel film of the same name, became the biggest-selling album of the year in the US, with 3.7m copies sold. High School Musical has since become one of the biggest brands in Disney's history. In 2007, the sequel became the most watched cable broadcast ever, with 179m global viewers. High School Musical 3 is out this October.

Hannah Montana first aired on the Disney Channel in March 2006 and it, too, has grown into a massive brand. It starts its third season in the US later this year. It has made Miley Cyrus, who plays Hannah, a schoolgirl who leads a "secret life" as a pop star by night, into the US's highest-paid teen entertainer. Cyrus's concert movie took $65m at the US box office, and she is paid in $1m a week on tour, with millions more coming from her TV show, CDs and endorsements. Disney has just signed up her autobiography for an undisclosed billion-dollar figure.

The Hannah Montana merchandise is extraordinary: pink frilly T-shirts emblazoned with Hannah's face, Capri pants, camouflage mini-skirts, sparkly handbags, skin-on nail sets, necklaces, earrings, Nintendo games, plus a range of novels and collectable dolls. Arguably, it's oversexualised, but it's also a boring feminine stereotyping: the message is that sparkly makeup, manicures and "killer" mini-skirts are what it means to be a girl. This is bling and glam for the under-10s. And little girls lap it up.

"Tweens heavily influence buying way out of proportion to their numbers," says Ken Hertz, an entertainment lawyer and branding expert whose firm represents Will Smith, Beyoncé Knowles and Gwen Stefani. "By the time someone has reached their late teens, they're much more difficult to influence." Tween consumers can get happily sucked in for life. "If you can get a fan at tween age, you have a good chance of keeping them for a long time. It's not a new thing. That is what allowed the Spice Girls to sell out Madison Square Gardens in 10 seconds. And that is why New Kids on the Block have a reunion coming up."

Not surprising, then, that big players in the music industry - Sony, Warner, EMI - are now homing in on this lucrative market. The tween client base is seen as crucial in a climate where sales to teenagers and adults have dropped by 21.2% annually since 1999.

British children are less consumerist than American kids, says Louise Barfield, London-based branding specialist and mother of a nine-year-old daughter, but the pressure is on. "I don't allow my daughter to watch commercial TV," she says. "It's useless products that are not going to enhance her life - clothing, tattoos, cosmetics." Sleepovers are a big thing with girls from the age of six and seven, she says, where girls may want to swap makeup and clothes. "The way they communicate via brands, products and characters can be worrying: it's the sharing of it all they are fascinated with. You want them to enjoy themselves, but you have to ask: is this what I want my little girl to be focused on?"
Viv Groskop

Caught up in the moment
Why stars love to pose for Annie Leibovitz

Five hours before John Lennon was shot dead in 1980, Annie Leibovitz photographed him naked. His arms and legs were wrapped lovingly, needily, around the fully clothed body of his wife Yoko Ono. His lips pressed to her cheek, his eyes shut in bliss. But that wasn't Leibovitz's original idea for the Rolling Stone cover. She had wanted him on his own, but Lennon insisted that his wife appear too. So Leibovitz suggested that the two pose together nude. Lennon obligingly began to strip, but Ono refused to take off her trousers. Without thinking about it much, Leibovitz recalled, she told Ono to keep all her clothes on.

"Then he curled up next to her and it was very, very strong. We took one Polaroid," said Leibovitz, "and the three of us knew it was profound right away." Lennon reportedly told her: "You've captured our relationship exactly. Promise me it'll be on the cover." It was, but not as planned: it appeared on the memorial issue for the murdered Beatle. But what had Leibovitz captured? "You couldn't help but feel that she was cold and he looked like he was clinging on to her." Which seems unfair: I can see Lennon's clinginess, but not Ono's chilliness.

The story of Lennon's last photoshoot undoes some of the mystique of how Leibovitz gets her subjects to disport themselves in daft, degrading, mildly titillating or otherwise compelling poses: sometimes at least, she has responded on the hoof to her celebrity subjects' annoying demands. She doesn't create a moment but is responsive to it, realising that the thing she's after is right there. But most professional snappers would say they could realise that too if they only had the same access to exhibitionist celebs as Leibovitz has had in the past 40 years. They, too, could have got the Queen to look wistful in a crown.

To be fair, Leibovitz can do jaunty, contrived composition, too. Her picture of Whoopi Goldberg in a bath of milk subverts the glumly pious Riefenstahl-Mapplethorpe black-meets-white aesthetic by sheer dint of Goldberg's joyfully cheeky open-mouthed pose. What Leibovitz often does is capture a striking image that flatters the sitter into thinking it discloses something profound, when it doesn't. Maybe that's what her lover Susan Sontag meant when she told Leibovitz: "You're good but you could be better."

But how did Leibovitz get Sting to stand in a bracingly ridiculous naked pose in the desert, covered in mud with hands coyly covering his tantrically accomplished genitals? How did she get Demi Moore to pose heavily pregnant, one hand cradling the heft of her bump, the other protecting readers' eyes from the sight of her nipple? How did she lure Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong to pose high and naked in the saddle of his racing bike? Or the voluptuous Scarlett Johansson and non-voluptuous Keira Knightley to lounge nudely in a double portrait, their daft rhyming pouts making the photo's wannabe sexy allure unintentionally hilarious? Because Leibovitz will get them on the cover of the glossies. Because, in the narcissistic cesspool of modern celebrity, she is Echo. Because she gives her subjects what they want and the rest of us, well, we get what we are given and some of us like it.

Leibovitz said that when Sontag came into her life, "I wanted to do better things, take photographs that matter." Has she? Leibovitz has taken some fine photographs of her family, children and Sontag. They are intimate, convincing and unflashy, everything her more recent celebrity work has not been. But she has become something of a hack, an obliging furnisher of kitsch. It happens, particularly when you've been doing something too long.

Earlier this month, for instance, her photo of US basketball star LeBron James and Brazilian model Gisele Bündchen caused a fuss. James had become the first African-American to figure on Vogue's cover, but some critics suggested it espoused racist stereotypes: he looked, they said, like the King Kong to her Fay Wray. James, it is worth pointing out, said he enjoyed the picture. We needn't: it brings two ho-hum stars together in a collision of cliches.

Or take her fascinatingly hideous, 2006 shot of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes en famille à l'herbe, dandling Suri Cruise. In this frame, the couple close their eyes in Hollywood's vapid simulacrum of conjugal felicity (the opposite of the real thing that John and Yoko gave Leibovitz). Even now, it makes me want to Photoshop in a payload of manure falling on to them from a swooping helicopter. Leibovitz held up a mirror to their smug narcissism and it refused to crack, damn it. No wonder she can get her subjects to do what she wants.
Stuart Jeffries

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