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Reports: Bill Clinton Arrives in N. Korea
FILE - In this file photo taken Saturday, June 13, 2009, former President Bill Clinton speaks during the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee gala banquet dinner in Washington. Clinton is heading to North Korea for negotiations to secure the freedom of two detained American journalists, a news report said Tuesday, Aug. 4, 2009, nearly five months after they were seized on the China border. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, File)
(Jose Luis Magana - AP)
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North Korea's Foreign Ministry last week lashed out at Secretary Clinton in unusually personal terms for "vulgar remarks" that it said demonstrated "she is by no means intelligent" after she compared North Korea's behavior to "small children and unruly teenagers."
Carter's trip to Pyongyang was intended to defuse a nuclear stand-off between the United States and North Korea. At the time, though, dismayed Clinton administration officials believed that Carter had engaged in freelance diplomacy that undermined the White House's negotiating stance.
Cha, the Georgetown professor, said it was "terribly ironic" that Clinton had been called upon to intervene in a similar standoff, but he did not think Clinton was visiting North Korea to negotiate a new agreement on the nuclear programs.
"It is entirely possible that" no agreement has been set for the journalists' release, said Cha, who called in a May op-ed in The Washington Post for the administration to send Gore to lobby on their behalf. "But it would be very difficult for the North not to give these people up" to a former U.S. president.
Lee and Ling were seized March 17 after walking across a shallow river that serves as the border between China and North Korea. The San Francisco-based journalists were researching a story about the trafficking of North Korean women to China.
Two others in the reporting team that crossed the river, producer Mitch Koss and a Korean Chinese guide, managed to flee, the North Korean government later said.
North Korea said that the women admitted at their trial that they came to North Korea to vilify its human rights record.
"At the trial, the accused admitted that what they did were criminal acts, prompted by a political motive to isolate and stifle the socialist system of North Korea, by faking moving images aimed at falsifying its human rights performance and hurling slanders and calumnies at it," the government said in an account of the closed trial.
Ling, 32, and Lee, 36, were sentenced June 8 after a five-day trial. The sentences, described by many outsiders as unusually harsh, could not be appealed, officials in Seoul said.
