The US is Upset with North Korea.
Clinton said the United States seeks their release on “humanitarian grounds” and that North Korea should immediately grant the prisoners clemency and deport them.
“Obviously we are deeply concerned about the length of the sentences and the fact that this trial was conducted totally in secret,” Clinton said. “We’re engaged in all possible ways through every possible channel to secure their release.”
With the sentence, the likelihood seemed to increase that the prisoners would be used as pawns in the ongoing standoff between North Korea and its neighbors and the West.
Clinton said international concern over North Korea’s nuclear ambitions should be “entirely separate” from the trial.
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Monday that the administration is working for the journalists’ release, and that it hopes the North Koreans do not link their detainment to “other issues.”
“These women are innocent and should be released to their family,” Gibbs said.
Clinton: U.S. Pursuing ‘Every Possible Channel’ to Free Journalists Held in North Korea
The US is angry that North Korea has sentenced two American journalists to years of hard labor based on what are likely trumped charges.
I’ve heard that Sami al-Hajj, a journalist who has been held — and mistreated — for six years in Guantanamo is now in a plane en route back to his native Sudan. His plane is supposed to arrive this evening.
That will end a particularly shameful episode. Sami (whose name is also spelled Sami al-Haj) was a cameraman for Al-Jazeera who was arrested in Afghanistan, apparently because he was mixed up with someone else. I’ve written about Sami several times, including once early this year, and also once in 2006 and once in 2007. There was never any real evidence that Sami was anything but a journalist, and his lawyers have said that the interrogators quickly gave up on asking him substantive questions. Instead, they asked him to spy on Al-Jazeera if he was released, and he refused.
When Sami went on hunger strike, the authorities took away his reading glasses and his toilet stand, which makes going to the bathroom excruciating after an injury he received shortly after being taken into custody. American officials, by imprisoning an Al-Jazeera journalist without charges or meaningful evidence, have done far more to damage American interests in the Muslim world than anything Sami could ever have done.
Therefore we have lots of credibility.
Lakhdar Boumediene is an Algerian (and Bosnian citizen) who, while living in Bosnia and working for the International Red Crescent, was arrested by the Bosnian government (at the behest of the Bush administration) shortly after 9/11 on charges of plotting to blow up a U.S. and British embassy, but was then quickly cleared by Bosnian courts of any wrongdoing and ordered released. But as he was about to be released — in January, 2002 — he was abducted by the U.S. military inside Bosnia and shipped to Guantanamo, where he remained without charges for the next almost 8 years, and was clearly tortured.
And anyway, torture has made us stronger because now people know we mean business.
“(North Korea) is using the sentence as bait to squeeze concessions out of the U.S. amid heightened tension,” said Lee Dong-bok, a senior associate with the CSIS think tank in Seoul and an expert on the North’s negotiating tactics.
The US is upset with North Korea.
Behold the fruit of a poison vine.
