The New York time has a story about the two journalists who were arrested in North Korea and had to bring Bill Clinton to release them.
At first when I heard of this story, I was wondering... How does one find herself in North Korea at this time of the year when tensions between the US and North Korea are high and Nuclear weapons are exploding...
Then I heard that they were journalists... I got even madder...
I thought these were journalists thinking that North Korea is some kind of an amusement park. They are naive and they wanted to make a story about North Korea and consequently found themselves in trouble and had to get the state department to rescue them.
But, I am afraid it's worse than that. They were doing a story on the North Korea refugees who took the underground railroad. And it's worst, because when they got caught, the North Korean authorities confiscated their videos. This will endanger the entire underground railroad operation.
Now, it's unclear how many people were taped and what information they delivered to the North Korean authorities. But it's very scary.
New York Times has the story:
SEOUL, South Korea — Laura Ling and Euna Lee, the two American journalists released after nearly five months in North Korean custody, have been widely portrayed at home as victims of unduly harsh punishment by a repressive government for simply doing their job.
But here in South Korea, human rights advocates, bloggers and Christian pastors are accusing them of needlessly endangering the very people they tried to cover: North Korean refugees and the activists who help them.
Not only that, the Obama admin had to compromise on their policy against North Korea, just to save these two...
The accusations stem from a central fear repeated in newspapers and blogs here: that the notes and videotapes the journalists gathered in China before their ill-fated venture to the border fell into the hands of the authorities, potentially compromising the identities of refugees and activists dedicated to spiriting people out of the North.
The Rev. Lee Chan-woo, a South Korean pastor, said the police raided his home in China on March 19, four days after the journalists visited and filmed a secret site where he looked after children of North Korean refugee women. He said that he was then deported in early April and that his five secret homes for refugees were shut down. The children, he said, were dispersed to family members in China, who could not afford to take care of them.
This is really bad, this could get ugly. So, they thought they could go there, make a documentary, come back to US and sell it to a big Network. After that, they would be set for the rest of their lives. In the process, they just put thousands of lives in danger.
This could be really, really bad. I am hoping it's not what it seems. This underground railroad was really doing a good job rescuing many people from tyranny, only for the money minded American journalists to come in and expose it.
The full story is available at NYT website.