US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has appealed for North Korea to show clemency and deport two US journalists sentenced to 12 years in a labour camp, calling it a humanitarian case.

"We think the imprisonment trial and sentencing of Laura and Euna should be viewed as a humanitarian matter. We hope that the North Koreans will grant clemency and deport them," she added.

The chief US diplomat, speaking during a meeting with Indonesian Foreign Minister Hassan Wirajuda, called for their "immediate release on humanitarian grounds", but did not explain why they should be freed on those grounds.

Ling and Lee were detained by North Korean border guards on March 17 along the frozen Tumen River, which marks the North's border with China, while researching a story on refugees fleeing the hardline communist state.

But Mrs Clinton said: "Obviously we are deeply concerned about the length of the sentence and the fact that this trial was conducted totally in secret with no observers"

White House spokesman Bill Burton said "the President is deeply concerned" by the sentencing.

http://www.smh.com.au/world/clinton-families-urge-clemency-for-journos-jailed-in-north-korea-20090609-c121.html

Whilst reasonably minded people would doubtless deplore the treatment of Ling & Lee by the North Koreans, the sad fact is that the protests of Clinton & the US government simply do not resonate against the backdrop of Abu Ghraib, Bagram air base, Guantanamo or the dozens of secret sites where it holds thousands of Muslims around the world.

Nor do such protests echo off the walls of the crowded morgues filled with the mutilated bodies of the Muslim dead in Baghdad or Kabul, nor from the tops of minarets in the villages & towns decimated by US iron fragmentation bombs in Gaza, where 1.5 million Palestinians live in the world's largest ghetto.

What do humanitarian pleas from the US amount to given its descent into torture?

What meaning can they have when the same political hollowmen sanction Israel's brutal air assaults on Lebanon & Gaza; assaults that have demolished thousands of homes & left hundreds dead & injured? How do such pleas look when the US lavishly funds & supports despotic regimes in Egypt & Saudi Arabia?

The US is not trying to end terror or promote democracy. It is busy ensuring that the corporate state has a steady supply of the cheap oil to which it is addicted. And the scarcer oil becomes, the more aggressive it becomes.

The Bush White House openly tortured. The Obama White House tortures & pretends not to. Obama may have banned waterboarding, but as Luke Mitchell points out in next month's issue of Harper's magazine, torture, including isolation, sleep & sensory deprivation & force-feeding, continues to be used to break detainees.

Obama has promised to close Guantanamo, where only 1 percent of the prisoners held offshore by the United States are kept, whilst seeking to obscure the fate & condition of thousands of Muslims held in black holes around the globe. As Mitchell notes, the Obama White House "has sought to prevent detainees at Bagram prison in Afghanistan from gaining access to courts where they may reveal the circumstances of their imprisonment.

Whilst Ling & Lee might genuinely be victims of human rights abuses, they at least were afforded trials. And whilst the US smears North Korea, condemning the secret nature of those trials, the reality is that Ling & Lee have been treated far better than the hundreds of thousands exposed to US exceptionalism .... & hypocrisy.