WASHINGTON – The Obama administration let North Korean leader Kim Jong Il save face by releasing two jailed Americans to former President Bill Clinton. The payoff — maybe not right away — is likely to be renewed dialogue with Pyongyang about its nuclear weapons program.After meeting with Clinton, who made an unannounced visit to the North Korean capital Tuesday, Kim pardoned and freed the young journalists who allegedly crossed into the country from China earlier this year. They were serving 12-year prison sentences.
“It could provide an opportunity to move forward on the nuclear issue, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing,” said Victor Cha, former Asia chief at the National Security Council. “The history with the North Koreans, as they have just done the past few months, is to put themselves out on a ledge. And they always need help getting off that ledge.”
Not so fast, said Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who had spoken with her husband after the pair was released.
She said the U.S. was not counting on a breakthrough but also said it could lubricate the way for the North to return to six-party talks about its nuclear program with the U.S., Russia, China, Japan and South Korea.
But there, perhaps, is the rub. The North Koreans have been demanding bilateral talks with Washington. The U.S., however, has shot down such overtures, insisting that it will work only through the six-party format.
North Korean behavior — ever an enigma — has included in recent months the withdrawal from those talks. The regime also launched a long-range rocket, conducted a second nuclear test, test-fired a barrage of ballistic missiles, and restarted its atomic program in defiance of international criticism and the U.N. Security Council.
Obama, while pushing heavy sanctions against the North for its recent nose-thumbing of the international community, also has been low key as he pursues a resumption of talks with the Stalinist regime.
That’s been difficult because the North is widely believed to be embroiled in a succession struggle after Kim reportedly suffered a stroke and began setting up a 27-year-old son to take power. Its saber-rattling was widely believed to indicate that its military wanted to show strength as a successor is chosen.
The White House has taken pains since Clinton’s arrival in Pyongyang to play the mission as a private one designed only to win the release of Laura Ling, 32, and Euna Lee, 36, both with former Vice President Al Gore’s Current TV media venture. They were captured while on assignment to collect material for a report about trafficking of North Korean women into China.
Bill Clinton undertook the mission, a senior administration official said, only after the North assured the White House that the reporters would be freed and allowed to return home with the former president.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to detail the back-channel negotiations, also said the north rejected Gore as a suitable emissary. The journalists’ families, Gore and the White House then turned to Clinton. The official said President Barack Obama did not speak with Clinton about the mission.
Daniel Sneider, associate director of research at Stanford University’s Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, said the journalists’ release followed weeks of quiet negotiations between the State Department and the North Korean mission to the United Nations.
Clinton “didn’t go to negotiate this, he went to reap the fruits of the negotiation,” Sneider said.
In photographs of Clinton with Kim, the former president stood somberly at the North Korean leader’s side, showing no signs of warmth. The official photographs were obviously intended for domestic consumption. Clinton is highly regarded in the North and his appearance with Kim will bolster him at home.
Pardoning Ling and Lee satisfied North Korea’s need to continue maintaining that the two women had committed a crime while dispatching the former president as emissary served the Obama administration’s desire not to expend diplomatic capital winning their freedom, Sneider said.
“Nobody wanted this to be a distraction from the more substantially difficult issues we have with North Korea,” he said. “There was a desire by the administration to resolve this quietly, and from the very beginning they didn’t allow it to become a huge public issue.”
As a former leader, Clinton was a good choice to represent the United States in the delicate deliberations, according to Sneider. He had the cachet to get an audience with Kim but could claim to be acting as a private citizen.
Obama in political box over closing Guantanamo
Obama was taking on the explosive topic Thursday, a day after the Senate, at the behest of majority Democrats, denied his request for $80 million to close the prison. The 90-6 vote followed a similar move last week in the House and underscored widespread apprehension among Obama’s Democratic allies in Congress over the issue.
In spite of lawmakers’ concerns, the Obama administration plans to send a top al-Qaida suspect held at Guantanamo Bay to New York to stand trial for the deadly 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa, an administration official told The Associated Press on Wednesday. The suspect, Ahmed Ghailani, would be the first Guantanamo detainee brought to the U.S. and the first to face trial in a civilian criminal court.
On his second day in office, Obama announced that within one year he would close the prison that was constructed by the Bush administration at the U.S. naval base in Cuba to hold terrorism suspects, most of them captured in Afghanistan.
The Obama administration says the lockup had become a “recruiting poster” for al-Qaida because prisoners were being held indefinitely without charges and some were subjected to “enhanced interrogation,” including waterboarding — a simulated drowning technique that Obama has called torture.
But when prisons close, inmates must either be released or sent to other jails, and Obama still “has not decided where some of the detainees will be transferred,” spokesman Robert Gibbs said Wednesday.
That’s the nub of Obama’s problem with both U.S. politicians and America’s allies abroad, who have been asked by the administration to accept some of the prisoners.
With Wednesday’s action in the Senate, lawmakers from both houses of Congress have gone on record criticizing the lack of specific plans about where to house inmates who are considered too dangerous for release or transfer to other countries.
Some Republicans also cite what amount to ideological concerns, viewing the closure as a security misstep and a further repudiation of former President George W. Bush. And both Democrats and Republicans have been retreating from an uproar in their districts over the possibility that terror suspects would be housed in local prisons.
That’s a fairly empty sales pitch for administration officials who are trying to persuade European and Muslim allies to take some of the detainees.
And they got no help Wednesday when FBI Director Robert Mueller told Congress that bringing Guantanamo detainees to the United States could pose a number of risks, even if they were kept in maximum-security prisons.
Gibbs and Attorney General Eric Holder both quickly responded that Obama would never do anything to endanger Americans.
Obama has named senior diplomat Daniel Fried as special envoy on the issue. So far he’s had little success in garnering commitments abroad and his task only grows more onerous with the votes in Congress to deny money to close the prison.
While France has accepted one prisoner, fulfilling a promise made when Obama attended a NATO summit in April, other European allies have refused or given nonspecific commitments.
As the debate on Guantanamo built in advance of Obama’s speech Thursday, Gibbs said the president understood such concerns and hoped to ease worries about prisoner resettlement.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney, who was deeply involved in the Bush administration’s development of Guantanamo policy, also was speaking Thursday on the topic at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Cheney has been an outspoken critic of Obama and his plans for closing the prison, saying they would make Americans less safe.
In addition to Guantanamo plans, Obama’s speech at the National Archives was expected to touch on his recent decisions to withhold pictures of enhanced interrogations, the decision to continue using military commissions to try some terror suspects and other legal issues surrounding the handling of the prisoners.
Obama also has been forced to fight a rearguard defense on his larger plans for handling terror detainees. Organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union have become noisy critics of the administration as the president has backed away from expunging military tribunals from the tool kit for handling prisoners.
Concerns on that front were sufficient Wednesday that Obama met at the White House with ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero and representatives of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Human Rights Watch and other such organizations.
Pakistan “in danger”, says Pervez Musharraf
any course of action to it.
“The country is in danger and if we get bogged down in minor and old issues, there will be problems,” Musharraf told reporters at the airport here before he embarked on a visit to Saudi Arabia.
“The issue is very serious. Everyone in the world is seeing the seriousness of the issue in Pakistan. Everyone is trying to chart a course of action,” he said.
At the same time, he said, Pakistan must chart its own course of action to steer the country out of the problems it is facing.
“And we have to be clear that nobody should dictate any course of action to us. We have to find our own course of action and save this country and move it forward towards progress,” he added.
Asked whether he thought the peace deal with the Taliban in northwestern Swat valley would usher in peace and end suicide attacks, Musharraf replied: “Nothing can be said (as of now). If the agreement is only for ensuring speedy and cheap justice within the Pakistani legal structure and system, then it is alright.” PTI
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