About those journalists freed from North Korea...

Something strikes me as weird about the two young women journalists freed from supposedly harsh captivity. What's up with all the baggage they carry?

Indeed, from the whole tawdry affair only one clear winner has emerged - an exuberant Bill Clinton - even if, according to an insider, ‘the joke in the White House was that the girls were safer in North Korea than on the plane going home with Bill'.

Well, so much for former President Bill Clinton's (D) status in the White House. While I'm delighted that the two young ladies returned safely--at what cost to the US is still to be determined--apparently their naivete played a large part in their--and subsequently the entire US's--predicament. They goofed around on the border between North and South Korea as if they had all the rights of illegal aliens crossing from Mexico into the US. (Not the other way of course--no rights for hapless Americans there.)

A Mail on Sunday investigation has unearthed some rather surprising facts about the pair - facts that show they were hopelessly ill-prepared for their ‘mission' to the Chinese-Korean border, that they were working for a minor television organisation run by a former ambulance-chasing lawyer and, while they no doubt did not intend to be captured, the hapless twosome ended up as valuable pawns in an international game of bluff and double bluff.

(snip)

Laura, 32, describes herself as a ‘Chinese American', but a friend said: ‘She was brought up as a true Valley girl [an upper middle-class girl]. She's about as Chinese as the cuisine at Chin Chin [a popular Californian-Chinese restaurant chain].'

Laura is said to be the duo's ‘driving force'. Euna, 36, who had little journalism experience and counted making a yoga video as a career highlight, was her devoted lackey, who reportedly held the video camera as Laura ‘danced around' on the North Korean side of the border.

For Euna, who was born in South Korea but moved to California when she was a university student, it was her first overseas assignment. The trip was Laura's second ‘dangerous' foreign job for Current, a Left-wing cable television network based in San Francisco that rather grandly aspires to ‘democratise' the news.

Fronted by Clinton's former Vice-President Al Gore, now a bona fide green activist, the station is the brainchild of Joel Hyatt, a fabulously wealthy 59-year-old lawyer who made his fortune running a chain of store-front legal offices.

So ladies--and Al Gore and Joel Hyatt--and all those other "fabulously wealthy" greenies, think about North Korea and its need to " 'democratise' the news" before you "dance around" dangerous borders as if you were in the free United States which saved your you know what.

Oh yes. And grow up.