While the media slept...

...or obsessesed over Britney's psych ward visit.

You won't hear about this from cable journalism:

From AP:

BANGKOK, Thailand—A Buddhist monastery that provided a hospice for AIDS patients has been closed down by the regime in Myanmar, which is also still arresting dissidents, the top U.S. diplomat in the country said Friday.
The monastery, in the biggest city Yangon, was raided Thursday. "Apparently, it was ordered closed. No one knows why," said Shari Villarosa, charge d'affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Myanmar.

She was speaking to reporters during a visit to Bangkok in neighboring Thailand.

Three military trucks arrived outside the Maggin Monastery and told everyone inside to leave, according to the online edition of The Irrawaddy, a news magazine run by Myanmar exiles in Thailand. The AIDS patients were moved by the authorities to an unknown location, it said.

Nor could you find anything about the mass protests last October of one of the world's most brutal regimes in the nation formerly known as Burma. You had to seek out the few real journaists working today, Amy Goodman, to get the story:

The image was stunning: tens of thousands of saffron-robed Buddhist monks marching through the streets of Rangoon, protesting the military dictatorship of Burma. The monks marched in front of the home of Nobel Peace Prize-winner Aung San Suu Kyi, who was seen weeping and praying quietly as they passed. She hadn't been seen for years. The democratically elected leader of Burma, Suu Kyi has been under house arrest since 2003. She is considered the Nelson Mandela of Burma, the Southeast Asian nation renamed Myanmar by the regime.

After almost two weeks of protest, the monks have disappeared. The monasteries have been emptied. One report says thousands of monks are imprisoned in the north of the country.

The U.S. has been strangely quiet on the matter. Other than a few stern words from Laura Bush, no real action has been taken.

You may wonder why an administration that presents itself as one that "spreads freedom" seems to ignore these atrocities.

Goodman has that covered, too:

The U.S. government has had sanctions in place against Burma since 1997. A loophole exists, though, for companies grandfathered in. Unocal's exemption from the Burmese sanctions has been passed on to its new owner, Chevron.

Rice served on the Chevron board of directors for a decade. She even had a Chevron oil tanker named after her. While she served on the board, Chevron was sued for involvement in the killing of non-violent protesters in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. As in Burma, Nigerians suffer political repression and pollution where oil and gas are extracted, and live in dire poverty. The protests in Burma were actually triggered by a government-imposed increase in fuel prices.

The U.S. ignored the crimes of Saddam Hussein's Iraq when they were occuring throughout the 1980s. Reagan's envoy at the time Donald Rumsfeld was on warm and fuzzy ground with Saddam and was more than eager to do business with him. It wasn't until 2003 that Rumsfeld suddenly had a problem with what happened.

Restoring democracy to Burma could easily be done peacefully. Forcing Chevron to cut ties with the Myanmar junta would deprive the military rulers of their financial stability and hold on power.

Maybe we can count on a future U.S. president addressing the issue 20 years after the fact.

(Photo: Members of the Solidarity Committee for Burma's Freedom Fighters stage a sit-in demonstration, demanding immediate release of Myanmar citizens Monday, Feb. 4, 2008 in Calcutta, India. 36 Myanmar citizens were arrested by Indian defense personnel near Andaman and Nicobar Islands in February 1998 and put under trial, according to a press release from the Solidarity Committee. The Associated press)