http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/23/AR2009072300947.html

Kim Jong Il was denied the purchase of two luxury yachts based on the U.N. sanctions for the missle tests earlier this year. He lost the deposit on the yachts to. News like this brings me a smile.

On the vote — it looks like pretty much a straight party-line vote with significantly more Dems crossing over than Reps…

….which makes Lugar’s vote stand out much, much more:

He’s a big player on the committee and in the Rep. party, and while more Dems are feeling the need to break ranks to join the minority Rep. party on an issue one of the powers in their own party (Kerry) is against — Lugar sides with Kerry….

That kinda sticks out….

If the test of the validity of this statement is whether or not ANY such reports are done in the future, well, then, certainly it would be false, but that isn’t a very good test…

I would bet with confidence that one reason you don’t see CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, FOX News, and the like reporting on the border area about the plight of North Korean refugees is — their concerns about the Chinese government.

It is “risky” to them, or for any reporter” to hang around the area trying to cover a story China doesn’t want covered. Does that mean nobody does it? Of course not. Does it mean larger news orgs are weary of going it? I think the answer is most likely – yes.

Organizations that large don’t want to run into trouble with China for different reasons. And we don’t see them sending crews or individuals to cover that area much.

When we do get something from them, it has been gathered on the initiative of much smaller outfits or individuals and they simply agree to offer it a viewing.

I’d also say Wide Angle has been great for hosting a couple of these documentaries, but PBS doesn’t exactly have the audience of CBS —

These big news organizations also factory in liability and insurance costs. I can remember this being an issue in covering Afghanistan and elsewhere in troubled regions. The big guys would sometimes pull their reporters, not so much out of concern for their safety, but out of concern for the rising insurance policies they had to carry for such work…

I can see that being brought up in a corporate boardroom when they start discussing perhaps sending a crew to the border area to report on NK’s human rights abuses and against the will of the Chinese government…

http://www.freekorea.us/2008/09/16/joe-biden-is-blocking-north-korea-human-rights-legislation-and-you-can-help-un-block-it/

The North Korea documentary which was Current TV’s assignment was already completed before they crossed the border. The “angle not officially approved by the state” exists in the city of Yanji, not at a remote sandbar on the Tumen River down in Yueqing township. The stories from North Korean refugees in Yanji were already documented by Laura and Euna, and before Current TV went there in March 2009 there were similar stories in Yanji published a month earlier in National Geographic magazine. Foreign reporters are not going to be afraid of venturing into Yanji and Dandong’s city limits. There is no important story for foreign reporters to tell on the frozen river border, the real journalism is being done in China’s border cities where refugees, traders, and even low ranking North Korean government officials can easily be found.

I would like to ask Mr. Stanton’s opinion of a Congressional staffer named Frank Jannuzi. According to the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean versions of Chosun Ilbo, it is Jannuzi who is assisting John Kerry for a possible envoy mission. I don’t know why the English version of that Chosun Ilbo article did not mention Jannuzi’s name.

Chinese:
据悉，凯利一直接受参议院外交关系委员会专门委员弗兰克-简兹的协助，目前正在考虑是否访问北韩。弗兰克-简兹曾多次访问北韩，拥有独自的对话渠道。

Japanese:
http://www.chosunonline.com/news/20090720000020

Korean:
케리 위원장은 수차례 북한을 방문하며 독자적인 창구를 가진 프랑크 자누지(Jannuzi) 상원 외교위 전문위원의 조언을 받아가며 방북 가능성 여부를 검토 중인 것으로 알려졌다.

I’m thinking no one else – previously or after the incident/trial – would be foolish enough to cross the border. But as far as covering the sex trafficking of female NK refugees, and overall refugee story, wouldn’t the attention Ling and Lee have brought to the issue actually have the opposite effect?

I think we could also at least entertain the idea that the US government’s choice of fighting to keep this issue low-key has always been a propaganda coup for the North. Enough news about it has spread around the world to accomplish #3 but not enough to raise any sense of world outrage that I can see. That would seem to me like a good thing for Pyongyang.

And in all likelihood, at least some small ransom (small on a national scale) will be paid by someone if these two women ever get out.

Through most of the early stage of this, I advocated the US government going ballistic on this, along with the other provocations, as the best way to curb NK’s behavior by using pressure. I did not think silence and ignoring it would be effective.

I did hold out the possibility that the US government was working hard behind the scenes to get the two women released, and maybe they would be able to do it, and that maybe I was wrong and keeping things low key would make NK decide there was little value in holding the two. I doubted it, but it was a possibility.

I think we have now entered the second or middle phase of this event, and the US has really nothing to show for it, unless its position was one of not caring about the two reporters and just wanted the issue to go away…

It is now harder for the US to change gears, if it decided to, and ratchet up negative global opinion over the holding of these two reporters or any of the provocations it has done. You really need to attack those things in the court of public opinion as they happen. It’s too late for that…

So, I’d say, if the US government was serious all along about getting these two free, what they chose as a solution has failed and by this point there is no reason for us to believe it has a better chance of success in the future.