The United States said the UN Security Council could take action against Myanmar’s military regime following international anger over the junta’s failure to release opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and its crackdown on ethnic minorities.

As Washington sought a second briefing on the situation in Myanmar at the Security Council this week, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the powerful global body might go beyond holding such a hearing and prescribe some form of action.

“That certainly is a possibility,” he told reporters as UN chief Kofi Annan himself expressed deep disappointment Tuesday at Myanmar’s weekend decision to extend the house arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi by another year.

“I understand that there is going to be a briefing for the Security Council, but I certainly wouldn’t preclude the possibility that action by the Security Council would end with just a briefing,” McCormack said.

He did not elaborate.

Experts said the Council was unlikely to impose any sanctions on the junta but could seek “non-punitive” action, such as adopting a resolution asking Annan to report to the council on developments in the Southeast Asian nation on a monthly basis.

The council could also demand the release of Aung San Suu Kyi and call for a stop to an ongoing bloody offensive by the junta against ethnic Karen rebels, they said. The United States put the international spotlight on Myanmar in December when it successfully pushed the Security Council to hold a briefing on human rights and other problems there for the first time.

“I’m disappointed that when the government reviewed her detention, it did not decide to release her,” Annan told reporters in New York, referring to the junta’s decision at the weekend to extend an arrest order on Aung San Suu Kyi. Hopes had risen that she might be released when her detention came up for review on Saturday, after the junta unexpectedly allowed her to meet visiting UN envoy Ibrahim Gambari a week earlier.

The meeting was her first contact with an outsider in more than two years.

Annan vowed to “work with our partners in the region,” including the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) to “bring pressure to bear.”

“We’ll work very hard,” he said.

Noting that the United Nations Security Council last discussed Myanmar’s case in December, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said separately that “Asian and European governments are urging the Burmese Government to change its cruel and misguided policies.”

Burma is the previous name of Myanmar.

Rice said “America is committed to advancing effective international action to help the people of Burma” and called “for the immediate and unconditional release of all prisoners of conscience, including Aung San Suu Kyi.”

The Nobel Peace Prize winner, who has been detained since May 2003 inside her lakeside home in central Yangon without a telephone, has spent 10 of the past 17 years in detention.

May 30 marks the third anniversary of an attack against a convoy in which she was traveling with other members of her opposition National League for Democracy (NLD) party in northern Myanmar, which led to her latest house arrest.

The NLD won a landslide election victory in 1990, but the military government never recognized the result. John Bolton, the US ambassador to the United Nations, had said he expected Gambari to provide a formal briefing to the 15-nation Security Council, possibly this week.

“Lines of communication have now been opened with Yangon following Mr. Gambari’s visit, and we hope to exploit those lines to move the process forward,” Annan’s spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, said.

But Jeremy Woodrum of the US Campaign for Burma group said Annan should press ahead with his mid-2006 deadline for Myanmar military rulers to release all political prisoners and reopen all NLD offices. “None of these requests have been met,” Woodrum noted. “The Secretary-General should not lower the bar now by getting excited over a line of communication.”