{"id":1320,"date":"2009-06-24T18:22:21","date_gmt":"2009-06-24T22:22:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/?p=1320"},"modified":"2009-06-19T07:27:37","modified_gmt":"2009-06-19T11:27:37","slug":"doing-the-crime","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/2009\/06\/doing-the-crime\/","title":{"rendered":"Doing the crime"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the great things about having a Twitter feed<\/acronym> is that you have a portal into the zeitgeist, an unwitting look, if you will, into what is captivating a certain segment of the populace at any given moment. Last week, it was the sentencing of 12 years of hard labor Laura Ling and Euna Lee, two Chinese-American journalists convicted in North Korea of illegally entering the country illegally and of “hostile” acts.<\/p>\n

According to first reports<\/a>, the journalists were detained by North Korean soldiers “on the border” between North Korea and China. “On the border” is pretty damn vague so while it is possible that soldiers from North Korea illegally entered China to capture a couple of journalists with a camera and other recording equipment, how likely is it that said journos were actually in North Korea? Let’s go with: probably they were.<\/p>\n

So last week many of the people and organizations on my Twitter feed were in an uproar over this sentencing. The reflexive call for them to be released, that this was a human rights violation, was enough to provoke a seizure. And I watched this all go by thinking two things: 1) I’ll investigate this when I have a chance, and 2) if they did it, don’t they deserve the punishment?<\/p>\n

Then the state-run Korean Central News Agency, which, oddly, has its domain registered in Japan, released a report saying that the journalists not only admitted in court that they’d entered the country illegally, but that they’d done so for political motives. The New York Times<\/em> also reported<\/a> that human rights advocates who worked with the two women to arrange the trip said their assignment was on “human traffickers and refugees fleeing hunger in North Korea” and that the journalists had no intentions of entering North Korea.<\/p>\n

It’s all a bit muddy isn’t it? Since North Korea is a fortress, who knows what really happened. But I’m still forced to wonder: what if they actually did it? Don’t they deserve to do the time for the crime?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the great things about having a Twitter feed is that you have a portal into the zeitgeist, an unwitting look, if you will, into what is captivating a certain segment of the populace at any given moment. Last week, it was the sentencing of 12 years of hard labor Laura Ling and Euna […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1320","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-thoughts","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1320","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1320"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1320\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1328,"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1320\/revisions\/1328"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}