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Clinton Seeks ‘Amnesty’ for Laura Ling, Euna Lee, Held by North Korea

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Friday that the United States was now seeking “amnesty” for two American journalists imprisoned in North Korea, a remark that suggests that the Obama administration was admitting the women’s culpability in a bid to secure their freedom.
 
“The two journalists and their families have expressed great remorse for this incident, and I think everyone is very sorry that it happened,” Mrs. Clinton said Friday morning during a wide-ranging question-and-answer session with State Department employees. “What we hope for now is that these two young women would be granted amnesty through the North Korean system and be allowed to return home to their families as soon as possible.”


The two journalists, Laura Ling, 36, and Euna Lee, 32, both reporters for San Francisco-based Current TV, were sentenced in June to 12 years of hard labor after a trial in which they were accused of entering the country illegally and committing “hostile acts.”

Ms. Ling reportedly called her sister, Lisa Ling, also a journalist, this week and said in the course of a 20-minute conversation that they had broken North Korean law, but her sister did not say how. Human rights advocates in South Korea have said they were on a reporting assignment about the plight of North Korean women sold through human traffickers and refugees fleeing hunger in North Korea when they were detained March 17.

Mrs. Clinton at first said the charges against the women were “baseless,” while the administration pressed for them to be freed on humanitarian grounds.

Her comments on Friday appear to reflect a changing picture that has been complicated by the North’s test of a nuclear missile in May and its decision to fire seven ballistic missiles into the Sea of Japan on the Fourth of July.

A scholar who visited the North said in an interview published Friday in a South Korean daily that the two women were not in a prison camp, but rather in a guest house in Pyongyang, a development that seemed to suggest that the North still wanted talks with Washington on the women’s release.

The scholar, Han Park, a political scientist at the University of Georgia, was quoted by the JoongAng Ilbo as saying the North Korean authorities told him the two women were “staying well in a guest house in Pyongyang.”

Mrs. Clinton’s comments during a town-hall-style meeting at the State Department came in response to an employee who did not identify herself, creating the appearance that the question was planted in an attempt to send a message to North Korea.

A department spokesman, P. J. Crowley, avoided questions about whether the administration had been in direct talks with North Korea.

Experts said that Mrs. Clinton appeared to be trying to keep the issue of the journalists separate from the conflict over the North’s nuclear ambitions.

“It’s clear to me they don’t want this tail to wag the nuclear dog,” said Michael Green, a top Asia expert for former President George W. Bush. “They are trying to keep it in a separate lane.”

But Mr. Green said the North was unlikely to release the women without getting something in return. Although North Korea does not expect the Obama administration to abandon its effort to impose sanctions on the North for its recent nuclear test, he said, it is likely to want a “high-profile visit” by an administration official to demonstrate that “it’s possible to return to business as usual.”

At a later appearance on Friday morning, Mrs. Clinton was asked if the State Department intended to send Professor Han as an emissary. “We have nothing to respond to about that,” she said.

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