Bill Clinton and the Reporters


So, on August 4th, 2009, Bill Clinton managed to fly out of North Korea with Euna Lee and Laura Ling, two journalists who had been tried and sentenced in North Korea, but received a pardon, officially due to former President Clinton's "personal humanitarian efforts."

Now what happened is pretty much what diplomacy is supposed to do. I call this a coup for Obama, and a win for Bill Clinton. We can argue as to whether the journalists should have been there at all, but a amongst the functions of government is the duty to protect and assist its citizens abroad. Having said that, there is always a cost/benefit analysis that has to be reviewed. In this case we do not have transparency we might like to determine what the true cost was. If the true political cost here was simply a visit by former President Clinton and the photo op and "legitimacy" that such a visit grants to the North Korean dictator, I'm okay with that. But was that all? Hard to know.

What really bothers me about this is the fiction that is being maintained with regards to this having been some sort of independent mission that now Citizen Clinton put together on his own with no direct instruction by the White House or by the Secretary of State. Bill Clinton isn't directly on the government payroll, so technically he is a private citizen, but it strains credulity to believe that the White House wasn't in on this event very closely.

Governments lie to their citizenry routinely. Sometimes I wonder if it is actually reflexively. I have a hard time figuring what the downside is for the White House to say something along the lines of "We were aware of the negotiations to secure a pardon for the unlucky reporters and did everything we could to ensure a positive outcome for all involved in keeping with our larger foreign policy goals."

I believe that democracy works best with an educated and informed electorate. That may be a faulty premise, but if it is, I still don't see how claiming that there was no White House involvement benefits the administration. If you want the people to trust in your guidance, why mislead them?

Then again, maybe trust isn't something that is being cultivated here. If the goal is to have a portion of the electorate distrust you and seem "paranoid" and flat out crazy (like the Birthers), and you count on those in the middle to give you the benefit of the doubt based on positive results, then maybe there is an advantage.

But that sort of reasoning is pretty twisted. Occam's razor and Carlos' first law tell me that this is not some devious ploy, but simply business as usual.

But from what I see now, the fact is that the reporters were released without any significant concessions from the United States Government, and that's a good thing.