Sentencing of Laura Ling and Euna Lee Brings Wave of Bad Press for N. Korea

By holding two journalists as hostages (it’s now pretty much beyond denying) and sentencing them to 12 years of “reform through labor,” North Korea has managed to inflame the media in a way that starving 2 million people and putting 200,000 others in concentration camps never quite did.  With the attention to Ling and Lee comes a delayed epiphany:  maybe North Korea’s regime really is evil:

• Washington Post, Blaine Harden:  N. Korean Women Who Flee to China Suffer in Stateless Limbo
• James Rainey, L.A. Times:  Truth and danger in North Korea
• N.Y. Times, Jesse McKinley:  Two Paths, Same Fate for Reporters Facing Prison
• N.Y. Times, Choe Sang Hun:  U.S. Protests N. Korea’s Treatment of Journalists
• San Francisco Chronicle: Jailed journalists attacked stories fearlessly
• L.A. Times, Raja Abdulrahim and Jessica Garrison: Friends speak up for L.A. journalists held by N. Korea
• ABC News:  Life Inside North Korea’s Vast Labor Prisons
• Time, Bill Powell:  Why North Korea’s Jailing of U.S. Journalists Isn’t Shocking

Better late than never.  Today, Kim Jong Il is getting so much bad press I barely have time to link all of it, much less analyze and quote it.

Related:  

• This online petition by tree-hugging hippies has over 50,000 signatures, though I wonder to whom these signatures will be sent.  I signed anyway, and declined the spam “updates” on animal rights and saving the rain forest.
• Photos of a recent vigil.
• A photojournalist who went undercover in North Korea, posing as a Belgian chocolate maker.  His must-see web site is here.
• The State Department maintains that Euna Lee and Laura Ling are innocent, although it still isn’t explicitly saying that the two were in China, as it did shortly after they were seized.