“Myanmar military seize aid shipment.” As opposed to …? Who’s supposed to seize it then? We distribute aid using soldiers. Can’t they?

Not that the western media shouldn’t want to stack the deck against the Burmese junta, but isn’t Burma’s forced labor, brutality and repressive military rule reason enough to foment our disapproval? I say the headlines have been looking more and more like US calls for Darfur intervention. Cyclone casualty figures went from 800 to thousands to 20,000 and now 100k. Without NGOs being able to get in and say exactly. The numbers escalate like a bidder eager to overcome the seller’s reluctance. What figure will launch an outcry suitable to relax Myanmar’s borders?

Does Myanmar want to retain its sovereign privacy so much as prevent western influence from arming potential rebels in the countryside?

Myanmar’s leaders are refusing to permit entrance to US aid workers, so we’re told. While that sounds synonymous to saying they don’t want Americans distributing the aid, it really means quite precisely they don’t want USAID personnel. For some odd reason, our media report “US aid” and USAID as synonymous, even though USAID stands for U.S. Agency for International Development, not “aid.” USAID is a branch of the US government, widely accused of being linked to the CIA. Venezuelan opposition groups were funded by USAID. The same has been going on in Cuba.

Where the Peace Corps was avowedly not affiliated with the US State Department, it was famously used by the CIA. The US government agency USAID, which deploys military crews, is the emergency philanthropic arm of the world trade lending system. It’s full of capitalist partisans, and hooked up, in intelligence parlance.