Comment left over at BFP's place:

For her latest Burma Post:

While I was in the UK I ended up working with Burma Campaign UK and a few other immigration related groups and saw a few of the eye witness accounts of stuff the current regime there did to people who even just attended NLD protests - shootings into gathered crowds to disperse them, people making it out of such violent confrontations only to get pistol whipped senseless when they run into check points on the roads away from the demonstrations.

Speaking of pistol whipped, the wiki page on the myanmar army is interesting - usual suspects are there selling arms, Heckler & Koch, Fabrique Nationale, TZ Italy and Israeli Military Industries are all there, using a neat work around the multiple trade embargos on the regime by selling the government the rights to produce their weapons - which means that myanmar makes the weapons, but the foreign businesses get paid for their acceptance of it.

Obviously all those groups are major clients of the US militaries, as well as most of the other first world nations - suffice to say they're all quite thoroughly within the military industrial complexes of the first world nations. THe only real exception is IMI, who's more innovative and interesting arms tends to get copied by H&K or other groups who then make a cheaper knockoff version (like the Mac-10 - which is often mistakenly called an "Uzi" because it so resembles the Israeli original) that governments buy.

But because it's a company owned pretty directly by the Israeli government it'd be pretty heavily affected by any sanctions or trade embargos placed on Israel itself for the ridiculous amount of crap it currently gets away with ontop of making money off of the broken bodies that come out of Myanmar's detention centres.

Obviously the PRC also sells all sorts of crap to myanmar, but it seems to be the sort of cheap aerospace crap that it's churning out recently as a side effect of its space program, but the PRC sells to everyone, because it's teh goddamn PRC and that's what it does (and yes, that's yet another reason why Jerome Armstrong's touting of dodgy chinese stocks was a morally Wrong thing, aside from the everything else about it).

Excuse the miltech pron there, I was a major Jane's geek at one point.

It very nearly goes with out saying that Aung San Suu Kyi is incredible as is the work of the NLD over the years - because it has gotten better there, and Aung San Suu Kyi has worked hard to keep the protests and movement peaceful and keep the more militant groups in check to such a degree that the Myanmar regime can't off her any more than South Africa could kill mandela or the british could have Ghandi carted off or the feds could directly shoot MLK - the country would tear itself apart in rage if they seriously hurt her.

And yes, Aung San Suu Kyi is up there with those guys, becuase while it could go without saying that she is fucking amazing, it shouldn't, because she is really awesome and makes me feel really warm and fuzzy with optmistic sprinkles on top.

If you can show your support in whatever way you can for the NLD it's kinda needed, because if the status quo remains unchanged to any serious degree, the Monks currently being held by Myanmar will likely turn up as corpses a few months from now.