Deputy Chief of Mission at U.S. Embassy in Seoul Calls Laura Ling and Euna Lee “Stupid”
A US diplomat in Seoul has shocked a group of visiting Congressional staff members by allegedly making highly insensitive comments about two journalists — Taiwanese -American Laura Ling and Korean-American Euna Lee — now facing serious criminal charges in North Korea.
William Stanton, deputy chief of mission at the US embassy in South Korea and a candidate for the next director of the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT), is said to have told the visitors during a briefing that the two young journalists were “stupid” and that their case was “distracting from bigger issues. [Taipei Times, William Lowther]
First, let me get one thing out of the way: I am absolutely, positively not related to this person. Second, let me posit that this statement is proof that William Stanton has absolutely no idea what the “bigger issues” are.
Congressional sources said most of the nine visitors — all in their 20s and on a training trip to Asia — were particularly distressed because both Ling and Lee could be sentenced to long prison terms and there is strong evidence they did nothing wrong.
At least one of the visitors was so upset about Stanton’s attitude that he wrote a memorandum to a member of Congress giving full details of the briefing, including Stanton’s statements.
The memorandum has become a topic of hot discussion among senior Congressional staff and a copy has been sent to the US State Department. No officials would comment on the situation last night and it is not known if it will lead to a formal inquiry.
The Taipei Times reports that William Stanton has been the subject of previous complaints, but doesn’t specify what for. Oh, and did I mention that he’s believed to be at “the top of the short list for [American Institute in Taiwan] director,” our de facto ambassador to Taiwan and quite possibly the most diplomatically sensitive post in existence? Shockingly, he is “known for his strong support for Chinese policies” and accused of having “impeded internal reports critical of the Chinese regime.” What? You mean in our State Department? Tell me it isn’t so.
William Stanton isn’t the only one in the embassy with that contemptuous view. According to a memo written by one of the staffers, the Seoul Embassy Political Counselor, Joseph Yun, chimed in to say that because of Ling and Lee’s captivity, the United States would now “have to raise thousands of dollars,” presumably in ransom money. (Thousands? Yet again, State underestimates North Korea’s negotiating chutzpah. Surely Kim Jong Il knows how promiscuously we’ve been bailing out insolvent empires lately.)
The families of Laura Ling and Euna Lee have also heard William Stanton’s comments, and now, of State’s true rationale for having “advised [the families] to keep low profiles and not to talk about the case.” State must dread the idea that Lisa Ling could get this story wide media exposure through The View, Oprah, or any number of outlets. State had even promised the families that the North Koreans would release Ling and Lee as part of an April 15th amnesty for Kim Il Sung’s birthday. Astonishingly, our diplomats had believed North Korean “assurances” that it would be so. Tough luck.
The Taipei Times report also says, without offering further detail, that “[t]here is evidence that the North Korean guards crossed the river and grabbed the women on the Chinese side, forcing them into North Korea at gunpoint.” I’d like to know what Lowther has heard, but here’s what a knowledgeable reader told me: Ling and Lee’s Chinese driver was a North Korean operative who led them into a trap — a suspected North Korean plot to take American hostages. Such a plan could only have been approved by Kim Jong Il himself, and was almost certainly meant to shield North Korea from the diplomatic consequences of its then-planned missile test. The main purpose would have been to take the measure of the Obama Administration, and of that, mission accomplished. I don’t doubt that a second North Korean motive was payback for Lisa Ling.
My source tells me that the Chinese cameraman has since disappeared.
If the report is true, it would fit each and every element of the U.S. Code’s definition of international terrorism.
It’s fair to say, then, that the circumstances under which Ling and Lee ended up in North Korean captivity are far from clear. So if William Stanton doesn’t know the circumstances under which these women were seized, we can only assume that what he really means to describe as “stupid” is the act of trying to report the truth of a grave and underreported humanitarian crisis. Would he have said the same about journalists killed or taken hostage while reporting in Iraq? Would the media have let him get away with that?
Regardless of the circumstances of Ling and Lee’s seizure, it’s a strikingly callous thing for a “diplomat” to say, and it’s one for the books as an example of simple diplomatic incompetence. The Chinese will now understand that their “good offices” need not be expended on obtaining the release of two American citizens who may have been seized from their territory. Even assuming that Lee and Ling had intentionally crossed the border — which seems exceedingly unlikely — any North Korean justification for holding them as prisoners ended hours after their detention.
One person who could help us get to the truth of the matter is the Current TV cameraman, who managed to escape. Like everyone else associated with Current TV, he’s suspended his dedication to fearless truth-telling.
Hat tip: Curtis.
Current TV has gone so far as to scrub its site of all postings referring to Ling and Lee. Current TV is doing this, of course, on the advice of our State Department, which would be the same State Department that has been so effective in resolving North Korea’s human rights atrocities, nuclear weapons program, threats to nuke Seoul and Tokyo, proliferation, and defiance of U.N. resolutions. The futility of “quiet diplomacy” isn’t helping to bring Laura Ling and Euna Lee home, either:
Is this what happens when information becomes more democratic? No one’s willing to step up? If you work for a viewer-supplied TV cable network, does that mean no one has your back?
This does not help the argument that the value of large news organizations is dwindling to nothing in favor of small entrepreneurs. There’s no encouragement for 2.0 reporting when its practitioners can disappear into the gulag with no one to fight for them.
Maybe there are furious back door efforts going on and these two reporters aren’t just pawns in the overarching political drama of North Korea’s imminent launch of a long-range missile. CNN, where Wikipedia says Ms. Ling’s sister works as a reporter, and other news outlets report that a Swedish diplomat is hot on the case.
But that shouldn’t stop some public uproar. Do we have to ask Google to go in there and flex a little muscle on behalf of the free flow of information? [Phil Bronstein, Huffington Post]
If there is any good news to this story at all, it’s the fact that this confession of breathtaking moral retardation may block one incompetent’s rise to a position of potentially catastrophic responsibility. The more distressing news is that Kim Jong Il has learned a lesson from the Mohammad Cartoons controversy: that all the talk we sometimes hear about the courage and independence of the news media is just that — talk. When faced with a challenge to their reporting of a legitimate news story that demands real courage, the media kneels before terrorists, and our government treats freedom of information like an encumbrance to its pursuit of bigger deals.
Hat tip to a anonymous reader.