Opinion: Can Al Gore rescue two U.S. journalists sentenced to hard labor in North Korea?

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For two families campaigning for the release of U.S. journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee, today’s news that they were found guilty of unspecified “hostilities against the Korean nation” and sentenced to 12 years in a North Korean labor camp was a blow, to say the least.

Now, U.S. efforts to win their release are escalating, both inside the Obama administration and outside the Beltway.

The two women were arrested in March while working on a story about the trafficking of women along the North Korean border with China for Current TV, the cable television network launched by former Vice President Al Gore and businessman Joel Hyatt. The station features three- to seven-minute “pods,” or short programs, some created by viewers, in an interactive format targeted to 18- to 34-year-olds.

So the White House is considering sending Al Gore to Pyongyang as a personal envoy to intercede on the journalists’ behalf. State Department spokesman Ian Kelly did not rule out the possibility. “This is such a sensitive issue,” he said, “I’m just not going to go into those kinds of discussions that we may or may not have had.”

Another possibility is sending New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who has had success in the past in freeing Americans held by North Korea. In 1996, a 26-year-old American whose mother was Korean, Evan C. Hunziker, was accused of spying after he swam across the Yalu River from the Chinese border. Richardson, then a congressman, negotiated his release. (Hunziker later committed suicide.)

But would Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appoint Richardson as a special envoy after the political tussles of the 2008 presidential campaign? After dropping out of the race, Richardson stunned....

...the Clinton camp by endorsing Obama. Former President Clinton, who appointed Richardson to two Cabinet positions, is still rankling over Richardson’s defection, according to a recent New York Times Magazine piece ironically titled “The Mellowing of William Jefferson Clinton.”

Further complicating the case is the escalating tension between the United States and North Korea over the communist regime’s nuclear program. Clinton has said the administration is considering putting North Korea on its official list of terrorist nations because of its nukes and is thinking about intercepting North Korean ships to check for nuclear materials.

In an interesting op-ed this morning in the Washington Post, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger argued that China has far more to lose in this tense negotiation, but so far it’s the United States, at least publicly, that’s been doing the heavy diplomatic lifting.

Praising Clinton for doing “a very good job of separating the issues” -- the nuclear problem and the prisoner problem -- Richardson said on MSNBC this morning that it’s still “premature” to talk about negotiations to win the release of the two journalists. First, he said, the U.S. government has to establish the right framework.

Demonstrating a rare ability to look at the world through the lens of an anti-democratic culture, Richardson said that by allowing the Swedish ambassador to visit the two women and giving them permission to phone their families, the North Koreans by their lights were actually treating the prisoners humanely.

And he said the two journalists’ sentence, which he acknowledged is “harsh,” is actually good news -- first because it ends their legal process, meaning negotiations can now begin for their release, and second because they were not convicted of espionage.

Meanwhile families of the two women are in agony. “She’s really scared,” said Laura Ling’s sister Lisa Ling, a “Nightline” contributor. “I mean, she’s terrified. My sister is a wife, with a medical condition. And Euna Lee is the mother of a 4-year-old girl, who has been without her mother for almost three months.”

-- Johanna Neuman

Photo Credit: Ahn Young-joon / Associated Press

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