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Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Clause! State Department spokesman Ian Kelly did not rule out such a possibility when asked if it would make sense to send Gore, who is chairman of the California station Current TV, which employs the two journalists. "It's a very, very sensitive issue, I'm not going to go into it," Kelly told reporters who pressed him on the matter. "This is such a sensitive issue, I'm just not going to go into those kinds of discussions that we may or may not have had," he added when asked whether Gore himself had raised the matter with the State Department. "The bottom line is that these two young women should be released but I'm not going to go into any kind of details on what we will or won't do," Kelly said when asked again if it would help to send Gore. Ooh! Ooh! Mr. Kotter! I think it would help, I really do! The two women, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, went on trial in North Korea Thursday on charges that could send them to a labor camp for years and further raise tensions with Washington following last week's nuclear test. The TV reporters were detained by North Korean border guards on March 17 while researching a story about refugees fleeing the hardline communist state. In a column published May 9 in the Washington Post, Victor Cha, a former adviser to president George W. Bush on North Korea, suggested that President Barack Obama's administration should send Gore to Pyongyang. Snicker! "The United States needs to send a high-level envoy to North Korea to bring these women home. The obvious candidate would be Gore," wrote Cha, who is now a a professor at Georgetown University. Maybe we could start out with a trade and then worry about the rest later? "The North Koreans would respect someone of his "Without fear of setting or breaking diplomatic precedent, he could issue whatever 'apologies' were necessary to secure the two women's release," according to Cha. "Similar token apologies have been issued in the past." Yes. For folks performing their duties and not trying to get a Poo-litzer Prize. In the 1990s, Washington obtained the release of two US nationals who were arrested by the North Koreans. One was a young man suspected of espionage and the other was a military helicopter pilot who was shot down after having entered North Korean air space. Posted by: gorb 2009-06-06 |
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