No Clout, No Freedom

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

For the past 10 months, three American citizens (two men and one woman) have been holed up in an Iranian prison.  They have been awaiting trial on charges of spying and entering the country illegally.  The Americans, who we are not naming, claim they were hiking in the mountains of Iraq and accidentally stepped across the border.  The truth, if there is such a thing in this case, lies somewhere in between.

This past week, those three Americans got visits from their mothers, who were hoping to secure their freedom while they were there.  Not only did that not happen, but Iranian officials declined to meet with the mothers.

You know what's missing here?  None of these individuals have the diplomatic or media connections that journalists Roxana Sabieri and Laura Ling had when faced with a similar situation, at least none that we know of.  We were reminded of this when Laura and her sister Lisa appeared on CNN's "Reliable Sources" to promote a book they had jointly written.  (To see the interview, go to www.cnn.com/video.)

In Laura's case, she was covering a story for Current TV about North Korean women escaping to China when she was arrested for briefly stepping across the North Korean border, then was charged with spying and sentenced to 12 years of hard labor.
 
The task of freeing Laura fell to Lisa, a well-known journalist who has appeared on "The View", Oprah Winfrey and the National Geographic channel.  Lisa told CNN that she worked her connections to make sure that (A) the American media limited its coverage of the incident, and (B) the leadership in North Korea (read:  Kim Jong-Il) sees her pleas for her sister's release on CNN, a channel she said they trusted.

Ultimately, it took former President Bill Clinton, whom the North Koreans seem to admire, to win Laura's release.  But not without a little help from the Obama administration and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

No doubt Laura Ling is lucky to be alive after all that.  But there's a fine line between being in a dangerous part of the world for a legitimate purpose and being stupid.  Especially when those parts of the world are run by leaders who may or may not have weapons of mass destruction, and diplomatic relations between them and the United States are iffy at best.

This does not mean that the three American hikers are doomed to rot in an Iranian prison for the rest of their lives.  We don't even know if diplomatic endeavours to win their release are ongoing.  But we do know this:  Sometimes it's not what you know, but who you know when it comes to getting released from a foreign prison.