The Burmese Government even refused the passage of Red cross to treat injured people.  The monks supported the cause and staged a protest march in the city of Sittwe and in Rangoon. By September 28 internet access has been removed by the government and journalists silenced.

So tommorow is the INTERNATIONAL DAY OF ACTION

A Day of International Action for a Free Burma

Free Aung San Suu Kyi & Support the Monks in Burma

Saturday 6TH OCTOBER 2007

Time: 12 NOON in every major city across the world

Marching in solidarity with the monks and ordinary people of Burma who are risking their lives for freedom and democracy.

We appeal to all religious and secular communities across the world not to look the other way while the people of Burma cry out for international support.

For more information: http://www.facebook.com/
group.php?gid=24957770200


*** SANA NAMAN the US govt would MAKE BETTER USE OF ITS HEGEMONIC BULLYING POWERS for what democracy and human rights really stand for.

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Monks Are Silenced, and for Now, Internet Is, Too

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/04/world/asia/
04info.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print

October 4, 2007
Monks Are Silenced, and for Now, Internet Is, Too
By SETH MYDANS

BANGKOK, Oct. 3 — It was about as simple and uncomplicated as
shooting demonstrators in the streets. Embarrassed by smuggled video
and photographs that showed their people rising up against them, the
generals who run Myanmar simply switched off the Internet.

Until Friday television screens and newspapers abroad were flooded
with scenes of tens of thousands of red-robed monks in the streets
and of chaos and violence as the junta stamped out the biggest
popular uprising there in two decades.

But then the images, text messages and postings stopped, shut down by
generals who belatedly grasped the power of the Internet to
jeopardize their crackdown.

"Finally they realized that this was their biggest enemy, and they
took it down," said Aung Zaw, editor of an exile magazine based in
Thailand called The Irrawaddy, whose Web site has been a leading
source of information in recent weeks. The site has been attacked by
a virus whose timing raises the possibility that the military
government has a few skilled hackers in its ranks.

The efficiency of this latest, technological, crackdown raises the
question whether the vaunted role of the Internet in undermining
repression can stand up to a determined and ruthless government — or
whether Myanmar, already isolated from the world, can ride out a
prolonged shutdown more easily than most countries.

OpenNet Initiative, which tracks Internet censorship, has documented
signs that in recent years several governments — including those of
Belarus, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan — have closed off Internet access,
or at least opposition Web sites, during periods preceding elections
or times of intense protests.

The brief disruptions are known as "just in time" filtering, said
Ronald J. Deibert of OpenNet. They are designed to quiet opponents
while maintaining an appearance of technical difficulties, thus
avoiding criticism from abroad.

In 2005, King Gyanendra of Nepal ousted the government and imposed a
weeklong communications blackout. Facing massive protests, he ceded
control in 2006.

Myanmar has just two Internet service providers, and shutting them
down was not complicated, said David Mathieson, an expert on Myanmar
with Human Rights Watch. Along with the Internet, the junta cut off
most telephone access to the outside world. Soldiers on the streets
confiscated cameras and video-recording cellphones.

"The crackdown on the media and on information flow is parallel to
the physical crackdown," he said. "It seems they've done it quite
effectively. Since Friday we've seen no new images come out."

In keeping with the country's self-imposed isolation over the past
half-century, Myanmar's military seemed prepared to cut the country
off from the virtual world just as it had from the world at large.
Web access has not been restored, and there is no way to know if or
when it might be.

At the same time, the junta turned to the oldest tactic of all to
silence opposition: fear. Local journalists and people caught
transmitting information or using cameras are being threatened and
arrested, according to Burmese exile groups.

In a final, hurried telephone call, Mr. Aung Zaw said, one of his
longtime sources said goodbye.

"We have done enough," he said the source told him. "We can no longer
move around. It is over to you — we cannot do anything anymore. We
are down. We are hunted by soldiers — we are down."

There are still images to come, Mr. Aung Zaw said, and as soon as he
receives them and his Web site is back up, the world will see them.

But Mr. Mathieson said the country's dissidents were reverting to
tactics of the past, smuggling images out through cellphones,
breaking the files down for reassembly later.

It is not clear how much longer the generals can hold back the
future. Technology is making it harder for dictators and juntas to
draw a curtain of secrecy.

"There are always ways people find of getting information out, and
authorities always have to struggle with them," said Mitchell
Stephens, a professor of journalism at New York University and the
author of "A History of News."

"There are fewer and fewer events that we don't have film images of:
the world is filled with Zapruders," he said, referring to Abraham
Zapruder, the onlooker who recorded the assassination of President
John F. Kennedy in 1963.

Before Friday's blackout, Myanmar's hit-and-run journalists were
staging a virtuoso demonstration of the power of the Internet to
outmaneuver a repressive government. A guerrilla army of citizen
reporters was smuggling out pictures even as events were unfolding,
and the world was watching.

"For those of us who study the history of communication technology,
this is of equal importance to the telegraph, which was the first
medium that separated communications and transportation," said Frank
A. Moretti, executive director of the Center for New Media Teaching
and Learning at Columbia University.

Since the protests began in mid-August, people have sent images and
words through SMS text messages and e-mail and on daily blogs,
according to some exile groups that received the messages. They have
posted notices on Facebook, the social networking Web site. They have
sent tiny messages on e-cards. They have updated the online
encyclopedia Wikipedia.

They also used Internet versions of "pigeons" — the couriers that
reporters used in the past to carry out film and reports — handing
their material to embassies or nongovernment organizations with
satellite connections.

Within hours, the images and reports were broadcast back into Myanmar
by foreign radio and television stations, informing and connecting a
public that hears only propaganda from its government.

These technological tricks may offer a model to people elsewhere who
are trying to outwit repressive governments. But the generals' heavy-
handed response is probably a less useful model.

Nations with larger economies and more ties to the outside world have
more at stake. China, for one, could not consider cutting itself off
as Myanmar has done, and so control of the Internet is an industry in
itself.

"In China, it's massive," said Xiao Qiang, director of the China
Internet Project and an adjunct professor at the graduate school of
journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

"There's surveillance and intimidation, there's legal regulation and
there is commercial leverage to force private Internet companies to
self-censor," he said. "And there is what we call the Great Firewall,
which blocks hundreds of thousands of Web sites outside of China."

Yet for all its efforts, even China cannot entirely control the
Internet, an easier task in a smaller country like Myanmar.

As technology makes everyone a potential reporter, the challenge in
risky places like Myanmar will be accuracy, said Vincent Brossel,
head of the Asian section of the press freedom organization Reporters
Without Borders.

"Rumors are the worst enemy of independent journalism," he said.
"Already we are hearing so many strange things. So if you have no
flow of information and the spread of rumors in a country that is
using propaganda — that's it. You are destroying the story, and day
by day it goes down."

The technological advances on the streets of Myanmar are the latest
in a long history of revolutions in the transmission of news — from
the sailing ship to the telegraph to international telephone lines
and the telex machine to computers and satellite telephones.

"Today every citizen is a war correspondent," said Phillip Knightley,
author of "The First Casualty," a classic history of war reporting
that starts with letters home from soldiers in Crimea in the 1850s
and ends with the "living room war" in Vietnam in the 1970s, the
first war that people could watch on television.

"Mobile phones with video of broadcast quality have made it possible
for anyone to report a war," he said in an e-mail interview. "You
just have to be there. No trouble getting a start: the broadcasters
have been begging viewers to send their stuff."

Mike Nizza contributed reporting from New York.