Sources say US President Barack Obama has become directly involved in developing a strategy to free Taiwanese-American Laura Ling (凌志美) and South Korean-American Euna Lee who have been sentenced to 12 years hard labor in a North Korean prison camp.
Obama is holding Oval Office talks with his closest advisers — including US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton — and sources say that one leading option may be to send a special envoy in the hope of negotiating the women’s release.
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There are believed to be two leading candidates for the task — former US vice president Al Gore, who co-founded Current TV, the company for which the women work, or former UN ambassador and current New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, who has experience dealing with Pyongyang.
Gore has refused to comment, but Richardson confirmed that the White House had called him for advice in playing the “high stakes poker game” North Korea is waging.
“What we would try to seek would be some kind of political pardon, some kind of a respite from the legal proceedings,” Richardson said.
White House spokesman Bill Burton said: “The president is deeply concerned by the reported sentencing of the two American citizen journalists by North Korean authorities, and we are engaged through all possible channels to secure their release.”
Meanwhile, Clinton appealed on Monday for North Korea to show clemency and deport the two US journalists, calling it a humanitarian case.
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Clinton also said Obama’s administration was “engaged in all possible ways through every possible channel to secure their release” as it appears to contemplate trouble-shooting roles for high-profile politicians.
Like others in the administration, Clinton urged North Korea to treat the women’s case as separate from the UN Security Council debate over how to respond to Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons test on May 25.
“We view these as entirely separate matters,” Clinton told reporters after a North Korean court sentenced the journalists for an illegal border crossing and an unspecified “grave crime.”
“We think the imprisonment trial and sentencing of Laura and Euna should be viewed as a humanitarian matter. We hope that the North Koreans will grant clemency and deport them,” Clinton said.
The chief US diplomat, speaking during a meeting with Indonesian Foreign Minister Hassan Wirajuda, called for their “immediate release on humanitarian grounds,” but did not explain why they should be freed on those grounds.
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