People watch a news program at a railway station in Seoul, reporting former U.S. President Bill Clinton's visit to North Korea August 4, 2009. Clinton made a surprise visit to North Korea on Tuesday to try to win the release of two jailed U.S. journalists, a move some analysts said could mark the isolated state's return.
I am watching the news coverage of President Bill Clinton giving photo op after photo op to the despotic ruler of a major player in the axis of evil and proliferater of nuclear weapons to Burma and the state sponsored global jihad regimes.
I can scarcely believe my eyes. Of course, it is a great relief to hear that the two kidnapped journalists will be released, but at what cost? Those girls should not have been there in the first place. I won't speak to the fact that they allegedly entered illegally. I want them out, but this way? Sending a former president to legitimize and give status to a mass murderer? Will the same be done for the three hitchhikers kidnapped by the mullahcracy in Iran?
I ask you: is that the US strategy? To reward those who commit the worst of crimes with the sanction of the highest political representation of the US? This on the same day that one of the worst regimes, Burma, goes nuclear vis a vis the North Koreans. Something Kim Jong Il has already done with Iran and Syria.
Looking at the longer term picture and the implications of a such suicidal approach leaves me with great worry for what's next on the savages' advancement of evil totalitarianism.
Clinton (on the left) and Kim Jong Il (on the right)
Bill Clinton in North Korea, meets Kim Jong-Il
The White House denied that Clinton carried a message from Hussein Obama, but isn't Clinton's tacit approval and appearance with this killer message enough?
Obama, played like a violin by evildoers, yet again.
SEOUL (Reuters) – North Korea on Tuesday released two jailed American journalists after a visit from former U.S. President Bill Clinton in the highest-level U.S. contact with North Korea since Clinton was president nearly a decade ago.
North Korea's KCNA news agency said North Korean leader Kim Jong-il had issued a special pardon to the two journalists, Euna Lee and Laura Ling of U.S. media outlet Current TV, which was co-founded by Clinton's vice president Al Gore.
Clinton was the highest-level American to visit North Korea since his secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, went there in 2000.
He was greeted warmly on his arrival and had what North Korea's KCNA news agency described as an "exhaustive conversation" over dinner with ailing North Korean leader Kim Jong-il and his top aides.
The White House denied a report by North Korea's news agency KCNA that said Clinton had carried a message to North Korea from U.S. President Barack Obama.
"That's not true," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters in Washington. Obama adviser David Axelrod told MSNBC that Clinton was on a "private humanitarian mission" and that "I don't think it's related to other issues."
Talk about contempt for the truth, not to mention for the American people.
Anti-North Korea protesters burn a defaced North Korean flag during a protest in Seoul, August 4, 2009.
UPDATE 7:04 pm: Ambassador John Bolton on Obama's latest surrender to evil in the Washington Post: Clinton's Unwise trip to North Korea
The Obama administration characterized Bill Clinton's unexpected visit to Pyongyang to secure the release of two American reporters, held unjustifiably by North Korea for nearly five months, as a private, humanitarian mission. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has insisted that the fate of the women who strayed into the North (whether accidentally or deliberately is still not clear), should be separated from the unresolved issue of the North's nuclear weapons program.
But North Korea has seen it very differently. Former president Clinton was met at Pyongyang's airport by notables led by Kim Kye Gwan, the North's long-time chief nuclear negotiator, an unmistakable symbol of linkage. In Pyongyang's view, the two reporters are pawns in the larger game of enhancing the regime's legitimacy and gaining direct access to important U.S. figures. The reporters' arrest, show trial and subsequent imprisonment (twelve years hard labor) was hostage taking, essentially an act of state terrorism. So the Clinton trip is a significant propaganda victory for North Korea, whether or not he carried an official message from President Obama. Despite decades of bipartisan U.S. rhetoric about not negotiating with terrorists for the release of hostages, it seems that the Obama administration not only chose to negotiate, but to send a former president to do so.
While the United States is properly concerned whenever its citizens are abused or held hostage, efforts to protect them should not create potentially greater risks for other Americans in the future. Yet that is exactly the consequence of visits by former presidents or other dignitaries as a form of political ransom to obtain their release. Iran and other autocracies are presumably closely watching the scenario in North Korea. With three American hikers freshly in Tehran's captivity, will Clinton be packing his bags again for another act of obeisance? And, looking ahead, what American hostages will not be sufficiently important to merit the presidential treatment? What about Roxana Saberi and other Americans previously held in Tehran? What was it about them that made them unworthy of a presidential visit? These are the consequences of poorly thought-out gesture politics, however well-intentioned or compassionately motivated. Indeed, the release of the two reporters -- welcome news -- doesn't mitigate the future risks entailed.
The Clinton visit may have many other negative effects. In some ways the trip is a flashback to the unfortunate 1994 journey of former president Jimmy Carter, who disrupted the Clinton administration's nuclear negotiations with North Korea and led directly to the misbegotten "Agreed Framework." By supplying both political legitimacy and tangible economic resources to Pyongyang, the Agreed Framework provided the North and other rogue states a roadmap for maximizing the benefits of illicit nuclear programs. North Korea violated the framework almost from the outset but nonetheless enticed the Bush administration into negotiations (the six-party talks) to discuss yet again ending its nuclear program in exchange for even more political and economic benefits. This history is of the United States rewarding dangerous and unacceptable behavior, a lesson well learned by other would-be nuclear proliferators.
