BANGKOK, Thailand -- Dodging a deadly military crackdown, bloggers in Burma are now on the front lines providing news and photos of death and insurrection.

Their Internet blogs, written in Burmese language and grammatically-flawed English, are mostly by people living in the commercial port of Rangoon, also known as Yangon, where Buddhist monks, pro-democracy activists and residents have been defying security forces during more than a week of protests.

The bloggers rely on word-of-mouth, cell phones, online chat groups, instant messaging, and first-hand experience in barricaded streets amid tear gas and gunfire.

The best blogs provide photos, video and text updates purportedly by eyewitnesses, which are later confirmed by news organizations or, in some cases, can't be verified.

Burma's bloody pro-democracy protests have captivated the outside world, including U.S. President George W. Bush, the United Nations and the public, thanks largely to the bloggers' media.

Letters received yesterday by The Cornucopia Institute, Organic Consumers Association, and the Center for Food Safety from Aurora Organic Dairy, based in Boulder, Colorado, threatened the three public interest groups with a lawsuit if they did not retract statements they had made concerning Aurora and refrain from filing a lawsuit against Aurora alleging consumer fraud.

The legal threats by Aurora are the latest salvo in a media battle stemming from formal legal complaints filed by The Cornucopia Institute in 2005 and 2006 with the USDA over Aurora’s alleged organic management practices. On April 16, 2007, the USDA confirmed Cornucopia's allegations by making administrative findings that the giant industrial-scale dairies, milking thousands of cows each, were not providing their cattle with pasture, as required by law, had illegally brought conventional cattle into their operations, and had committed a number of other serious improprieties.

The most serious finding, resulting from the USDA investigation, was that Aurora sold, labeled, and represented milk as organic when in fact it was not, in "willful violation" of the law.

Jeremy Scahill, author of a terrific book on the Blackwater mercenary army, spoke in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Tuesday to a packed hall.  He took questions at the end, and one man asked something to the effect of "Why does the government want to privatize the military?  We taxpayers have been paying for the Army."  I wished Scahill had pointed out that it's the tax payers who are now paying the private corporations, but the answer Scahill gave was critical. 

"There's a cynical answer and an honest answer," he said, "and I think they're the same answer."  He said that the Pentagon is useless to politicians because it doesn't make campaign "contributions".  But when you take a big chunk of that enormous military budget and give it to private companies, you free it up to come back (some portion of it) to politicians every campaign season.

Scahill has the ability to tell the story of one little corner of corruption and through it provide an understanding of the overall military industrial media congressional complex.  The corner of corruption he focuses on is Blackwater.

New York- Newly unearthed records reveal that, in 2004, when Americans were in the midst of a brutal electoral battle over whether to reelect a president posing as a war hero, a commanding US reporter, Dan Rather, went AWOL.

Just three months before the election, Rather had a story that might have changed the outcome of that razor-close race.  We now know that Dan cut a back-room deal to shut his mouth, grab his ankles, and let his network retract a story he knew to be absolutely true.

In September 2004 when Rather cowered, Bush was riding high in the polls.  Now, with Bush's approval ratings are below smallpox, Rather has come out of hiding to shoot at the lame duck.  Thanks, Dan.

It began on September 8, 2004, when Rather, on CBS, ran a story that Daddy Bush Senior had, in 1968, put in the fix to get his baby George out of the Vietnam War and into the Texas Air National Guard.  Little George then rode out the war defending Houston from Viet Cong attack.

The story is stone-cold solid.  I know, because we ran it on BBC Television a year before CBS (see that broadcast here).  BBC has never retracted a word of it.