Now that Al Gore’s two jailed employees have been retrieved by Bill Clinton from North Korea, there’s talk of a seven-figure book deal for their story, with the U.K’s Daily Mail speculating about a movie deal to follow. It would be interesting to hear in full the tale of Laura Ling and Euna Lee. But from the little we have heard so far, it seems at least one of them  – Laura Ling —  did deliberately cross into North Korea.

This was folly of enormous magnitude. That act has already cost Americans, by way of winning for Kim Jong Il the propaganda coup of snapping his fingers and having a former U.S. president jet in for an audience with Kim in Pyongyang. Whether additional ransom or concessions to Kim were involved, we wait to find out — but it would come as no surprise. Did Ling and Lee, both described as journalists, not notice that the border in the area where they were traveling is edged every few hundred yards with sentry huts, manned by armed North Korean guards?

While no one deserves the terror of being subjected to North Korea’s version of “justice,” there is something that feels simply wrong about the prospect that the two women, now safely home, stand to make a killing out of their story. In the end, they got out; it is less clear whether some of their contacts in China were so lucky. Veteran North Korea-watcher Joshua Stanton notes on his terrifically informative blog, One Free Korea , that among activists helping North Korean refugees, there’s big concern that materials Ling and Lee had on them when they were captured might have led to North Korean refugees being nabbed in China and sent back to North Korea. These folks cannot expect the relatively soft handling which Kim apparently reserved for his American prisoners; nor can they expect Bill Clinton to race back over in his private jet and airlift them out to sell their book and movie rights.

And whatever the details, the basic arithmetic here is that anything which helps fortify the Kim Jong Il regime is bad news inside the borders of North Korea — where Kim’s gulag carries on, with its starvation rations and murderous sentences of hard labor.

In another illuminating post, put up April 7th, Stanton ran through a list of what we might reasonably expect from Ling and Lee, now that they are home. This included the advice:

“If you did cross the border voluntarily, mortgage your homes now and start writing checks to repay the taxpayers for whatever your ransom cost us.”  

That sounds reasonable. Though in light of the talk now circulating about a payola of book and movie deals, I have another suggestion. It would be entirely fitting for Laura Ling and Euna Lee to donate whatever money they make from their story to some of the private charitable organizations whose staff — often at considerable sacrifice — dedicate themselves to genuinely helping the North Korean refugees whom these two women set out to write about.

UPDATE: “Clinton Delivers” is the headline on the Drudge Report, with breaking news that in response to Bill Clinton’s visit to Pyongyang, North Korea’s Kim Jong Il has pardoned the two jailed American journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee. They are expected to be home shortly, and it will be a welcome relief when they are free of North Korea.

But the huge and disturbing question is, what else has Bill Clinton delivered? And to whom? The White House is calling Bill’s trip a “private mission,” but there are reports that Bill was met at the Pyongyang airport by North Korea’s chief nuclear negotiator,  Kim Kye Gwan – a curious choice of host if Clinton went only to discuss the two hostage journalists. Likewise, just how private is it when Clinton had a long talk with Kim Jong Il over a dinner hosted by North Korea’s National Defense Commission.

Kim Kye Gwan and Kim Jong Il led the Bush administration on a merry dance via the Six-Party Talks of recent years, in which North Korea raked in concessions and aid from the U.S. — and cheated, with the resulting collapse of the deal late last year. The same regime did the same to Bill Clinton when he was president in the 1990s — talk, sign, collect, and cheat. North Korea’s totalitarian regime is not a system in which morality, decency or human kindness figure as motivating factors. Kim Jong Il got something from the U.S. for those journalists — the question is, did he simply get the already huge concession of a visit from a former U.S. president and husband of Obama’s secretary of state? Or did Bill Clinton deliver a lot more to Kim, which we have yet to hear about?

More on the Pyongyang calculus below, as posted just after Clinton arrived in Pyongyang, but before the report that “Clinton Delivers”:

Snatch two American journalists, get yourself a visit from an American ex-president — with added payolas likely to follow.

That’s the conclusion the strategists of North Korea’s Kim Jong Il regime might reasonably draw, as Bill Clinton arrives in Pyongyang to navigate the release of the two American journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, who were nabbed by North Korea, accused of trespassing on its turf and sentenced to 12 years of hard labor. I use the word “navigate” rather than “negotiate” for whatever Clinton is about to do in North Korea, because his arrival there — as ex-president and husband of President Obama’s secretary of state — is, in itself, already a U.S. concession to North Korea; a deal already struck, with more U.S. concessions likely to follow).

There’s every reason for North Korea to be pleased with this arrangement. The last American ex-president to tread the corridors of Pyongyang was Jimmy Carter, who went to North Korea in 1994, while Bill Clinton was president. Out of that visit, 15 years ago, came the Agreed Framework nuclear freeze deal, in which North Korea was promised two modern nuclear reactors and a flow of aid, and got to store in-country its spent nuclear fuel (which later came in handy when Kim decided to reprocess it for nuclear bombs). On Clinton’s watch, construction began on the reactors, the aid flowed, Madeleine Albright dropped by in 2000 in a propaganda coup for Kim — and North Korea cheated on the deal.

The net effect was to help Kim Jong Il consolidate power and sustain his regime. Kim enhanced his missile arsenal, expanded his proliferation networks, starved an estimated million or so of his countrymen to death, and conducted nuclear and long-range missiles tests in 2006 and this spring.

Now Bill Clinton has come calling on Pyongyang. One can feel enormous sympathy for the two journalists whose release he’s gone to obtain. It would be a very good thing to see them come home. But this is a terrible way to handle it, and the precedent now being set is monstrous.

What will be the real costs of this high-profile brand of ransom payment? It’s not only the tyrant regime of Pyongyang that’s noting the rewards of hostage politics –  which is becoming hard to distinguish from Obama’s broad efforts in any event to engage with the world’s most ruthless and manipulative tyrannies. Iran has just picked up three Americans accused by Iranian authorities of straying over the border from Iraq. Which ex-president should Iran now expect to come calling? Or, given the current calculus of hostage politics, and appeasement whatever the cost, should we expect that Obama will do it himself?

Another item for the Obama Outrage Overload file:

Among the 16 winners picked by President Obama this year for the high honor of receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom is a very strange choice indeed:  A former president of Ireland and former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson.

You can read plenty about Robinson’s record in an article written in 2002 by the American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Rubin, “Mary Robinson, War Criminal?” There’s plenty of appalling detail, but the nature of the problem is exemplified by Mary Robinson’s role as secretary-general of the UN’s infamous 2001 Durban conference. That gathering was supposed to focus on fighting racism, but instead ended up as such as jamboree of anti-semitism that then-Secretary of State Colin Powell ordered the U.S. delegation to walk out.

So why on earth would Obama tap Mary Robinson for the Medal of Freedom? There’s an interesting article on the American Thinker, in which Ed Lasky speculates that the suggestion might have come from one of Obama’s foreign policy gurus, Samantha Power.  I have no idea whether that’s correct, or where Obama got the idea from. But Lasky in his article mentions that Power wrote a book about Robinson’s successor as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Sergio Vieira de Mello, and in researching the book, might have come across Robinson.

That made me curious enough to flip open Power’s 2008 book, “Chasing the Flame,” (a work of strange infatuations in its own right) and check the index. It’s not clear from the book whether Power knows Robinson (though they have both moved for years in circles that intersect). But Power certainly does mention her. On page 349, Robinson is described as having been “outspoken in her criticisms of the Bush administration’s human rights abuses in the wake of 9/11.” Robinson is further described as having criticized the U.S. — the UN’s biggest single donor — for not giving a bigger percentage of its GNP for foreign aid.

Writes Power, “Unsurprisingly, the United States refused to support her bid for a second four-year term as high commissioner. Still she was unrepentant.” Power quotes Robinson’s retort to the U.S.: “Holding back criticism for whatever political reasons,” said Robinson, “takes away the legitimacy of the agenda and the cause.”

Well, fast forward to 2009, and we now find Washington making amends to Mary Robinson for snubbing her Durban-style “agenda” and her America-trashing “cause.” Obama will confer the Medal of Freedom upon her in an official ceremony on August 12th  . Who’s next? Hugo Chavez?

No, it’s not Iraq we’re talking about here. It’s the U.S. State Department. In an editorial on “Banishing Our Friends,” The Wall Street Journal reports that the State Department has revoked the diplomatic visas of a number of officials from Honduras, where the interim government is part of a struggle to defend democratic institutions against the Hugo Chavez-style aspirations of the ousted president, Manual Zelaya.

Meanwhile, urged on by the United Nations, the same State Department has been quietly busy batch-processing some 1,300 or more Palestinians in Iraq, former favored guests and beneficiaries of Saddam Hussein, for permanent resettlement in the U.S.  Basically, State is proposing to import to the U.S. almost the entire population of a refugee camp located along the Iraqi border with Syria. I’ve always been in favor of admitting as many refugees to the U.S. as safely and reasonably possible — especially refugees who have put their lives on the line to stand up for democratic values. But about these Palestinians, whose interests were long entwined with Saddam’s, may we at least hear more on why the administration believes there is no security risk?  More in my column for Forbes.com , on “Your Tired, Your Poor, Guests of Saddam.”

It’s not just the dissidents of the Middle East who are networking on the net. The First Lady (or, under the circumstances, the First Tyrantess) of Syria, Asma Al-Assad, appears to have posted high-fashion photos of herself on Facebook .

It pays to be married to Syria’s dictator.

Somehow, amid the news in recent years of Syria’s clandestine North Korean-abetted nuclear reactor project; support for the terrorists of Hezbollah and Hamas; fingerprints on the murder of Lebanon’s former prime minister; corrupt dealings with Saddam Hussein followed by support for terrorist attacks inside Iraq; horrific prisons; jailing and torture of dissidents, and whatnot, I’d missed Asma’s page — complete with her designer shoes, and handbags and fancy clothes and jewelry – on Facebook.

 But the Reform Party of Syria (or RPS), a U.S.-based private group whose members would like to see democratic rule in Syria, has just called attention to it, in an item headlined: “Marie-Antoinette Al-Assad.” RPS reports that “The issue was brought to our attention by angry Syrians inside Syria. People who work with poor families. Such as mothers who cannot afford to buy milk for their children and fathers who cannot find work and go hungry 24/7.”

RPS continues: “Syrians are poor and hungry, asphyxiated by lack of liberties and stifling oppression. While their miserable lives carry them on a day-by-day basis, whether it comes to food or a roof over their heads, our own Marie-Antoinette is having none of that.”

I went looking for some more background on Asma Al-Assad, born and educated in London, with a career in merchant banking before she married Bashar Al-Assad in 2000 — the year he took over from his father, longtime and brutal dictator of Syria, Hafez Al-Assad. Having in short order googled my way to a piece on the Huffington Post, I found I’ve come late to the party. Earlier this month, Asma Al-Assad told Britain’s Sky News that she would like to welcome the Obamas to Damascus. Excited about the idea, Huffington recently featured a spread of “our favorite Asma looks,” enthusing about “her love for Christian Louboutin platforms, sunglasses, and her signature wavy hair.” (Note to Michelle Obama: Whatever the fashion thrills this might portend, don’t do it!).

All told, Asma Al-Assad has better taste than Imelda Marcos in shoes, but much worse taste in regimes to go with them. As tyrants go, Bashar leaves the Philippines’ late Ferdinand in the dust (that’s safe to say, even with no love lost for Marcos). You can find more of Asma’s fashion looks here (with Bashar in Paris) and a gardening episode here.  You can read about Syria’s “ties to the world’s most notorious terrorists” and strengthening ties with “fellow state sponsor of terrorism, Iran,” in this 2008 State Department report on State Sponsors of Terrorism.  You can read more about Syria as one of the world’s most repressive regimes here and here.

You can learn strange things, poring over transcripts of remarks made by U.S. officials traveling abroad (we do this so you don’t have to). And so it was when I pulled up a transcript of remarks made by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last weekend in Mumbai, India. These were the remarks in which, to the Obama administration’s growing list of apologies for the United States, Clinton added a U.S. apology to India for the climate of the planet:

“Our point is very simple: That we acknowledge, now with President Obama, that we have made mistakes — the United States — and we along with other developed countries, have contributed most significantly to the problems that we face with climate change.” (The main thing Clinton got for her pains was a demand from India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that the West fork over almost $200 billion per year to the developing world to offset costs of cutting emissions).

Come again, Madame Secretary? You don’t have to love carbon to understand that there are tradeoffs in this world. While America’s free enterprise system has been emitting all that now-reviled carbon dioxide, it has also served as the world’s liveliest source of inventions for improving quality of life around the globe. The verdict of real science (as opposed to United Nations “consensus”) is still out on what causes climate change, or whether carbon dioxide has anything much to do with it. But in coping with a global climate that has been changing since before our ancestors crawled out of the primal soup, the best hope of mankind for adapting to the weather is not a global web of UN-driven caps and regulations, but precisely the kind of creativity and flexibility that has been the hallmark of the American system. It’s a terrible idea to constrain that, and it’s dangerously absurd to apologize for it. More on this in my column this week for Forbes.com , “Stop the Apologizing.”

In further remarks, Clinton responded to a press question about her meeting earlier in the day with a number of influential Indian business executives, include the head of Reliance Petroleum, which has served in the past as a major supplier to Iran of gasoline — a product for which Iran does not have enough refining capacity to meet its own domestic demands. Clinton was asked if she had discussed with these Indian executives the possibility of using gas exports as a lever against Iran. (Interest in such leverage has been simmering on Capitol Hill, and in response to this, Reliance recently halted gas exports to Iran. But the Obama administration, rather than talking up this example, or leaning on other suppliers to stop as well,  keeps skirting the issue, while trying to extend that hand to Tehran).

Clinton’s answer: A big shrug. She did not discuss it, and this is something “we will look at later.” 

That’s one mixed up set of priorities. What America really ought to be sorry about is a foreign policy that apologizes for the weather, while ignoring a last, best hope for peacefully stopping the Iranian march toward nuclear crisis in the Middle East.

Photos of North Korea’s Kim Jong Il have drawn attention over the years for many reasons, one of the more memorable snapshots having turned up on the cover of the Economist about nine years ago, showing a rotund Kim, with his trademark bouffant hairdo, raising his hand in a half salute. In that case, the best part was the caption: “Greetings, Earthlings.”

But recent footage, aired by North Korean state television, has been getting more attention than anything yet — showing, or so it seems, Kim Jong Il near death’s door. The once round Kim is gaunt, his once-thick hair is thin. He is reported to walk with a limp, and believed to have had a stroke last summer. This past Monday, South Korean media began reporting that according to unnamed Chinese and South Korean intelligence sources, Kim is suffering from pancreatic cancer.

With a possible transition of power in North Korea as context, I’ve put down some thoughts about this in my column this week for Forbes.com, “Dear Leader, Dead Leader?” — urging, and not for the first time, that America’s best bet for coping with North Korea’s murderous, WMD-loving, global racketeering, nuclear extortionist regime is to stop trying to negotiate with these guys, and undermine them entirely. We used to call it “regime change,” and as a policy for coping with predatory totalitarian governments, it has an excellent record — from World War II, to the Soviet collapse, to — yes — Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

One of the great weaknesses of totalitarian governments is that they have no clear procedure for handing off power. Because the rules morph with the whim of the ruler, transitions happen by way of power struggles, fraught with internal instability. Will Kim be succeeded by his 26-year-old son, Kim Jong Un? By his 63-year-old brother-in-law, Chang Song Taek? By a North Korean variation on Burma’s junta? These are some of the guesses topping the list. But chances are that even Kim’s hairdresser doesn’t know for sure.

For that matter, it isn’t even confirmed that Kim has cancer. North Korea is a country in which even the ruler’s birth date isn’t clear. Officially, Kim is 67 years old, born in 1942 on the sacred Mount Paektu. Unofficially, he is believed to be 68, born in 1941 in Russia. He rules over a system which tested a ballistic missile in April, but advertised it as the launch of a satellite which had gone into orbit broadcasting tunes of glory about Kim and his late father — which was all very interesting, except there was no satellite. 

As I write this, the ousted president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, is reportedly aboard a plane, trying to return home. The Honduran military has reportedly been ordered to stop him. Zelaya was ejected by his fellow Hondurans after he made a shady play to revise his country’s constitution to keep himself in power. Appropriately, for someone who already belongs to the thuggish club of pals of Venezuela’s would-be president-for-life, Hugo Chavez, Zelaya — according to the AP – is traveling in a Venezuelan jet. And accompanying him is the last thing Honduras, or any other other embattled democracy needs: The president of the United Nations General Assembly, Miguel d’Escoto Brockman.

D’Escoto sums up just about everything wrong with the United Nations. As head of the 192-member-state General Assembly for its 2008-2009 session, he has been empowered to swan around the world, swaddled in the UN flag and purporting to speak for the poor, the oppressed, and the “international community.” In truth, d”Escoto is a Nicaraguan Sandinista retread, oozing hard-left dogma, praising some of the world’s worst despotisms and agitating from his plush UN offices in midtown Manhattan for massive transfers of wealth from the world’s leading democracies to his pals in tyrants’ cockpits of places such as Iran.

I mention Iran in particular because d’Escoto made a five-day visit there in March, with his expenses apparently paid by the Iranian government. He  returned to New York to hold a press conference trashing free countries such as the U.S., and praising Iran’s regime as one enjoying “great respect.” For more detail, here’s a link to my column at the time for Forbes.com , covering D’Escoto’s performance on that occasion.

D’Escoto took special pains to denounce the U.S. for having “demonized” his buddy, Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – whose rigged “relection” as president on June 12th, as we all know, has inspired massive protests inside Iran itself.

Wielding the credentials of president of the UN General Assembly, D’Escoto enjoys the pernicious position of being a prominent official who is responsible in theory to everyone, but in practice is accountable to almost no one — while serving at the pleasure of a General Assembly which is dominated by unfree states. The GA’s most powerful voting bloc is the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference, which overlaps with the so-called Group of 77 — a UN caucus organization which actually includes 130 members, who chose as their chairman for 2009 … wait for it… Sudan. That’s the kind of crowd behind d’Escoto.

Whatever the perils and complexities ahead for Honduras, as its people try to defy the despotic shadows spreading out of places such as Venezuela, Iran, and the UN itself, the last thing any democrat anywhere needs to see, especially in a moment of crisis such as Honduras now faces, is the bulky figure of Miguel D’Escoto Brockman, disembarking from a plane, and offering his own variation on one of the world’s most terrifying sentences: I’m from the UN, and I’m here to help you.

The above phrase — “not helpful” — is from a U.S. State Department Spokesman, describing:

a) A staffer who forgot to turn off the coffeepot

b) A staffer who spelled Secretary of State Clinton’s first name with only one ‘l”

c) A cloakroom attendant who lost the spokesman’s coat.

d) North Korea’s in-America’s-face test-firing, on July 4th, of  yet another round of missiles, following illicit missile tests earlier this week, in May and in April (in that case a long-range rocket), plus a sanctions-busting nuclear test in May.

… I wish we could rule out (d), but it’s the only choice above that goes without saying. The State Department, both under Condoleezza Rice, and now under Hillary Clinton, has for some time now been in the habit of chiding rogue regimes in lingo usually reserved for naughty children.

It is way past time for the State Department to stop producing such twaddle, and address North Korea’s brazen threats in terms a lot more hair-raising and a lot less “helpful” to North Korea.

“Silliness,” is how a Pentagon spokesman has just dismissed North Korea’s recent threats to wipe America off the globe and drench South Korea in “A fire shower of nuclear retaliation.”

Think again. For starters, let’s ask whether it’s really a good idea for America to treat lightly — even for p.r. puposes — a rogue regime testing nuclear weapons, testing long-range missiles and making direct threats of nuclear war. The world is watching this stuff, and it gives Kim’s pals in places from Venezuela to Iran all sorts of ideas about how far they can go in threatening and pushing around America and America’s allies. That line is moving right now almost by the day — and not in a good direction.

The list of North Korean outrages, transgressions and rank barbarisms is by now so long, and much of it so familiar, that it should hardly need repeating. The missile proliferation into the Middle East; the nuclear proliferation networks, including the secret reactor built by Syria in cahoots with North Korea (destroyed by an Israeli air strike in 2007); the gulag inside North Korea in which people are starved, worked to death, or executed outright for “disloyalty” to the regime. North Korea’s counterfeiting of U.S. currency (which should be taken, in itself, as an act of war); the narcotics peddled over the years out of North Korean legations around the world; the kidnapping of Japanese citizens; the kangaroo trial and sentencing to 12 years at hard labor of two American journalists this spring; the raw threats, the nuclear extortion, the broken promises, the failed Agreed Framework nuclear freeze of the 1990s, the failed Six-Party Talks of the Bush administration, the impotent flailings to date of the Obama adminstration (”Words must mean something” … oh really?). 

Houston — or, rather, Washington — we have a problem. A big problem. And even if you believe that Kim Jong Il is  much too fond of his pleasure-women and French cognac to actually sacrifice himself to the rigors of genuine nuclear war, we still have an enormous problem. That problem is the North Korean regime, which has been in the business of inflicting mayhem and misery on its own citizens, and the wider world, since Stalin installed Kim’s father as the tyrannical Great Leader (does that remind anyone of Iran’s “Supreme Leader?” — it should) at the end of World War II.

One of the mantras we’re now hearing is that North Korea’s uptick in threats, nuclear and missiles tests, and whatnot, are all just part of the preparations for the evidently ailing Kim Jong Il to hand over control to one of his sons — at the moment the designated heir seems to be Kim Jong Un. If so, this is — as the State Department might put it — an unhelpful succession process. The civilized world cannot afford a global scheme in which tyrants ensure dynastic continuation of their regimes by waving around nuclear weapons and threatening to rain nuclear fire on places such as South Korea, or the United States.