I was intrigued while reading Henry Kissinger's piece The North Korea Fallout in the Washington Post to find the legendary Master of Diplomatic Immunity once again chanting in the same choir as his sworn enemy the Great Contrarian.
Amid the widespread relief that American journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee have avoided the brutal fate meted out to them by a North Korean court, it may seem captious to consider the long-term implications of President Bill Clinton's trip.
The impulse to save two young women from 12 years of hard labor in a North Korean gulag is powerful. Yet now that this goal has been achieved, we need to balance the emotions of the moment against the precedent for the future.
It is inherent in hostage situations that potentially heartbreaking human conditions are used to overwhelm policy judgments. Therein lies the bargaining strength of the hostage-taker. On the other hand, at any given moment, several million Americans reside or travel abroad. How are they best protected? Is the lesson of this episode that any ruthless group or government can demand a symbolic meeting with a senior American by seizing hostages or threatening inhuman treatment for prisoners in their hand?
I call your attention to a small detail about Laura Ling and Euna Lee, the two American journalists who were wrongfully arrested, illegally detained, and then capriciously released by the crime family that controls the northern section of the Korean peninsula and treats all its inhabitants as slave-prisoners and all the neighbors within its missile range as hostages.....
As of last week, and as the result of a huge investment of time and energy and prestige and forced politeness, we can now claim to have reduced the North Korean prison population by exactly two, and they were going to be released anyway. In return, we have immensely gratified and flattered the man who kidnapped them and who makes a daily mockery of international law. There was even "remorse" expressed. But guess by whom? Not by the slave master who makes his territory impossible to enter and impossible to leave. A lousy day's work.
When Bill Clinton welcomed Laura and Euna aboard his jet in Pyongyang, they were tired, depressed and worn out by their long ordeal in the North Korean prison system....
Despite the differences in prose style and in the minor points each is emphasizing, on the main issues of Clinton's mission of mercy playing Kim's evil hands the two men are singing from the same hymnbook, albeit if not on precisely the same page. While Henry is less confrontational and less condemnational of the North Koreans, there is really nothing in his stance that Christoper could take much exception to, although if he wanted to be his usual picky self, he might suggest that his fellow choirboy was singing in the wrong key or had too deep a voice to do justice to this particular tune.
When it comes to the sermonizing, Bishop Kissinger is the voice of gentle reason while Pastor Hitchens does his well-known parody of a rabidly certain, fundamentalist preacher. These girls were "wrongfully arrested" and illegally detained," he says. By whose law and in whose opinion? It's a question that many of his readers, caught up in the fire and brimstone of his performance, will not have stopped to ask.
Dearly beloved, I must caution you that whenever we find two such Chaucerian frauds as these in the pulpit and both are engaged in relating variations of the same parable, as indeed they have been doing since the opening of our current century, we would do well to check whether their text comes from sacred or profane sources. And in this case, it appears that they are both reading from the Book of Jackanory with a dash or two of Grimm's Fairy Tales and 1001 Arabian Nights thrown in for good measure, and with Kissinger reciting the original prose while Hitch gives us the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical interpretation. For by focusing exclusively on what an evil regime is resided over by the devilish Kim Song Il, their preaching obscures some rather unpleasant but nonetheless essential facts about Laura and Euna's trip to North Korea.
For instance, according to journalist Stephen Gowans writing in Cyrano's Journal Online, they deliberately entered North Korea illegally with the intention of producing "video footage that would add to the Western campaign of demonizing north Korea" and they "were working with a right-wing evangelist who is trying to destabilize north Korea."
Ling and Lee, then, had three strikes against them.
1. They entered north Korea illegally. 2. They were on a mission that could only be regarded by Pyongyang as hostile, for their documentary, had it been completed, would inevitably have demonized north Korea. 3. They were aided by an anti-DPRK evangelist whose aim is to bring down the north Korean government by training and deploying an evangelical Christian fifth column.
For these reasons Ling and Lee were convicted of illegal entry and committing a hostile act. They were sentenced to 12 years hard labor.
The US media, US state officials and ordinary US citizens have reacted to the arrest, conviction and sentencing of the two journalists with outrage. This is partly due to the State Department and US media portraying Ling and Lee as innocents who either mistakenly stumbled across the border or were abducted on Chinese soil by north Korean border guards. Acknowledging that the pair deliberately crossed the border illegally might reduce the outpouring of sympathy.
The arrest, conviction and sentencing of Ling and Lee have played into the hands of propagandists who cite the event as an example of north Korea’s disdain for press freedom. This is partly a red herring. Part of their sentence was related to their unlawful intrusion into north Korea. This has nothing whatever to do with press freedom. Press freedom does not give journalists carte blanche to cross international borders without authorization.
The other part of their sentence relates to a hostile act. This is closer to the idea of repressing press freedom, for it appears the hostile act the pair was convicted of pertains to the collection of documentary footage, while on north Korean soil, that would be used to vilify the country. Demonization is standard operating procedure for Western journalists covering north Korea. What Western press report on north Korea hasn’t begun with the assumption the country is belligerent, provocative, mismanaged, and repressive? While vilifying north Korea may be standard operating procedure, this doesn’t make it acceptable or any less intolerable to north Koreans. Vilification provides Western ruling class forces with openings to mobilize public opinion at home to justify economic warfare against, and military confrontation with, north Korea. While we may think of the words and ideas journalists wield as innocuous, their words and ideas have very real – and potentially devastating – consequences for the lives, safety, and well-being of north Koreans.
By the time they were leaving the plane on the other side of the Pacific, however, they were estatically happy, fully refreshed if shagged out after their long flight, and raring to go. I don't know how that old smoothie Bill Clinton does it, but he certainly has a rare gift for making women happy.
Gowans also says that "[d]enunciations of north Korea by US sources for arresting, trying and jailing the journalists are hypocritical" because the US also restricts and marginalizes press freedom. Al Jazeera's English Service, for instance, is virtually banned in the US, being available only via cable providers in Vermont, Ohio and Washington D.C. On top of that Gowan reminds us that Uncle Sam is not above imprisoning journalists without charge and leaving them to rot.
In Iraq, the US military has detained dozens of journalists since 2001. While Ling and Lee faced formal charges and were afforded a trial, the journalists the US military lock up are held without charge and denied access to the courts. Bilal Hussein, an Associated Press photographer, who won a 2005 Pulitzer Prize for spot news photography, was imprisoned by the US military for over two years without charge or trial. While rallies have been held in support of Ling and Lee, few US citizens are aware of the Iraqi journalists held by the US military.
Gowan's Guilty as Charged is a sizzlingly good article and reading it will definitely help us to understand even more clearly that Hitchens is as full of shit as a sewage farm. More importantly,it will form another brick in the wall of our education regarding the nature and boundaries of the "free society" we've been conditioned to assume we live in.
As Hitchens, even more than Kissinger, has seen fit to totally ignore the existence of law in the course of his crusade to beat the devil of Pyongyang, and because he has also recommended publicly that in the interests of learning about freedom and liberty we all watch A Man for All Seasons, let's once again Christopher's favorite scene from that play. And as you do so, ask yourself whether, in practice, Christopher is closer in temperament to Roper or More?
William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law! Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil? William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that! Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!
Yes, the whole Ling and Lee incident is a bit of a minefield for Christopher. It's a struggle between everything he hates and everything he hates that isn't Muslim, namely, crazy Christians, totalitarian theocrats, and Bill Clinton. He couldn't let on that these brave girls were part of a Christian effort against the godless North Korean regime because that would bring up the question of why there are no atheists in this particular foxhole. He couldn't afford to tell the truth about why and how they were detained because that would entail admitting that the North Koreans had the law on their side. He couldn't even give Kim's goons some credit for not treating these captives as badly as Bush's and now Obama's goons have been treating numerous Innocent and guilty people alike that they have picked up legally or illegally and thrown into a legal limbo complete with torture chambers. And he absolutely can't afford to say a single word in favor of anything the Clintons have ever done, because that would amount to the renunciation of a personal creed he has followed for almost twenty years. No wonder he felt compelled to conclude last week's sermon with the disconnected phrase, "A lousy day's work."
“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant." • "If it is an offense to justice to hold people who may have been victims of mistaken identity or of vendettas by other factions, then it is also an offense to justice to release psychopathic killers who believe that they have divine permission to throw acid in the faces of girls who want to attend school." • "Don't be such a lesbian!
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