I've been thinking the same thing - and expecting to hear it said in the media, but no one has said it. No one has said outloud that the Burmese rulers have no desire or incentive to save the lives of the countless poor people that have been so tragically harmed by the cyclone. No one in the media, or our government, has verbalized the truth - that the reason outsiders are not being allowed in to the country is because the military dictators there want to shroud their activities so that no one can hold them accountable for letting the citizens starve or die of thirst or preventable infection.

But you said it, Darrell. It needed to be said.

Now, when will we also face up to the way in which American based corporations have allowed the citizens there to be enslaved (forced into low paying back breaking work) by the government so that the government could perform lucrative work for the American corporations?

We are not just the people standing outside the border wishing to offer aid to the cyclone victims. We are also the shareholders of oil companies that have made the military rulers wealthy.

What few media reports we have gotten, I've looked closely at the faces there. They seem so vulnerable, so sweet, so unprepared, like children almost. The pain in their faces haunts me. I pray for them every day. We all have accountability in this.

Nora Thomason

It's not difficult to draw comparisons between what that government is doing to (and how it regards its) poor victims of disaster - and how the Bush administration neglected and disregarded the needs of the poor victims of Hurricane Katrina. In both cases, the ruling elite have no need for the poor and have no incentive to offer them help.