As a Fargo artist renders one local symbol of press freedom in stencils — journalist Roxana Saberi, who was accused of spying and jailed in Iran — another pair of American reporters remain imprisoned in North Korea. But there’s a new development in their case.

Artist Matt Mastrud — aka Punchgut — turned his focus from rock bands to images of Fargo-born journalist Saberi in a pair of recent works, but he says he has little political intent behind them: He just likes Saberi’s smile. Saberi, accused of spying by Iranian officials, was freed after spending four months in a Tehran jail. Said Mastrud, “It was pretty much just a nod to a fellow northside Fargoan, you know?”

Saberi’s fellow reporters — Euna Lee and Laura Ling of Al Gore’s news project Current TV — haven’t been as lucky: In June, they were sentenced to 12 years in a labor camp for “hostilities against the Korean nation and illegal entry.”

But today there’s a new development: Former President Bill Clinton has made a surprise trip to Pyongyang to plead for their release.

“This is a very potentially rewarding trip. Not only is it likely to resolve the case of the two American journalists detained in North Korea for many months, but it could be a very significant opening and breaking this downward cycle of tension and recrimination between the U.S. and North Korea,” Mike Chinoy, author of “Meltdown: The Inside Story of the North Korean Nuclear Crisis,” told the AP.

This morning White House press secretary Robert Gibbs released a statement on the trip: “While this solely private mission to secure the release of two Americans is on the ground, we will have no comment. We do not want to jeopardize the success of former President Clinton’s mission.”

Mastrud’s art in on display at Fargo’s Upfront Gallery through August 15.

The pair was working on a piece about the trafficking of women for the online video news site and weren’t aware that they crossed the border into North Korea, they said. While American officials work “feverishly” (according to ABC News) in an effort to secure their release, Spencer Ackerman at the Washington Independent tracks down what a “labor camp” sentence means. From the State Department’s 2008 Human Rights Report:

Reeducation through labor, primarily through sentences at forced labor camps, was a common punishment and consisted of tasks such as logging, mining, or tending crops under harsh conditions. Reeducation involved memorizing speeches by Kim Jong-il…

If the pair are dubbed political prisoners, they may face harsher conditions, including “prolonged periods of exposure to the elements; humiliations such as public nakedness; confinement for up to several weeks in small ‘punishment cells’ in which prisoners were unable to stand upright or lie down; being forced to kneel or sit immobilized for long periods; being hung by the wrists; being forced to stand up and sit down to the point of collapse.”

The same report underscores the importance of Lee’s and Ling’s work exposing trafficking of women across the border with China:

There were no known laws specifically addressing the problem of trafficking in persons, and trafficking of women and young girls into and within China continued to be widely reported. Some North Korean women and girls who voluntarily crossed into China were picked up by trafficking rings and sold as brides to Chinese nationals or placed in forced labor. In other cases, North Korean women and girls were lured out of North Korea by the promise of food, jobs, and freedom, only to be forced into prostitution, marriage, or exploitive labor arrangements. A network of smugglers facilitated this trafficking. Many victims of trafficking, unable to speak Chinese, were held as virtual prisoners, and some were forced to work as prostitutes. Traffickers sometimes abused or physically scarred the victims to prevent them from escaping. Officials facilitated trafficking by accepting bribes to allow individuals to cross the border into China.

The Obama administration would like to keep the journalists’ cause separate from bargaining over North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, but many fear the country will use the case as leverage. Word is Obama is considering sending former Vice President Al Gore (founder of Current.com) or New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson to Pyongyang to negotiate for the duo’s release.

In a rare news conference Valentine’s Day morning, President Bush strongly defended the troop surge in Iraq and touted the recent multinational agreement on nuclear weapons with North Korea. While both received nearly equal time in the president’s address, questions from reporters mainly focused on Iraq.

Reporters particularly focused on a contradictory message coming from the White House on whether the Iranian government was behind the supply of weapons to Shiite militants in Iraq. Recently, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates claimed that the United States had intelligence showing the Iranian leadership was involved. Bush said today that the United States knew the Iranian special military force known as Qods (pronounced “kudz”) supplied the weapons, but was unsure as to whether they had received their orders from the Iranian leadership.

more insideThis corresponds with a recent statement by Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman and Gen. Peter Pace in an interview with Voice of America. “It is clear that Iranians are involved,” he said, “but I would not say by what I know that the Iranian government clearly knows or is complicit.”

Reporters followed with questions about whether the administration was manipulating intelligence implicating Iran as it had done so with Iraq before to the current war. “Is this pretext for war?” one reporter asked.

While Bush delivered his prepared remarks with confidence and clarity, he was obviously uncomfortable with most of the questions coming from the reporters. “What assurance can you give American people that your intelligence is accurate?” another reporter asked.

“Do you agree with the national intelligence report that Iraq is in a state of civil war?” queried a third.

While he answered many of the questions with a simple “yes” or “no,” the president’s responses were mostly evasive, and he often repeated himself to make a point. Even then, his answers remained unclear. The only time he gave a direct answer was when one reporter asked if he had issued the instructions to leak Valerie Plame’s CIA connection to discredit her husband, ambassador Joseph Wilson. “Not gonna talk about it, Peter,” he said, repeating the same line three times when the reporter persisted.

North Korea said Sunday night that it had set off its first nuclear test, becoming the eighth country in history, and arguably the most unstable and most dangerous, to proclaim that it has joined the club of nuclear weapons states.

One of the better articles on the implications of this watershed event comes from, as usual, The Economist.  It’s a little dated (from 2003) but still relevant.  You can find the whole article here (along with the origin of the picture to the right), but this is a nice excerpt:

It is hard to exaggerate the danger in North Korea’s finger-on-trigger taunts to America and the world that it already has a few nuclear bombs, is busily producing the stuff to build more, and will make use of them in whatever ways it chooses. Such nuclear swagger from one of the world’s reckless squad jeopardises peace on the Korean peninsula. It also endangers stability in East Asia, where threats hurled at the neighbours risk setting off an arms race and a chain reaction that could tempt several countries, including Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, to turn nuclear at speed.

In my humble opinion, the biggest problem with North Korea getting the bomb is not the direct threat is poses (which isn’t completely insignificant mind you) but the destabilizing factor it brings to the east asian theater.  You better bet that this is going to have a significant affect on the thinking of several non-nuclear states in the region; the most significant of which is Japan.  The whole thing gets messy if Japan feels like revising its constitution to allow offensive military forces.  Then throw in the ticking time-bomb that is Taiwanese-Chinese relations and, well, you have a mess that could get a lot of people hurt.

Any way you cut it, this is bad news.  But it’s news we’ve seen coming for years.  And it’s news that we’ve done little to prevent for years.  Now I can’t definitively say that if Al Gore or John Kerry were President North Korea would not have the bomb, that would be a very unreasonable assertion to make.  It is very reasonable to assert, however, that the myopic focus of the Bush administration on Iraq has led them to devote less attention to Korea than the situation deserves.  And there is no doubt that the commitment of significant military and monetary resources to Iraq has diminished our ability to credibly threaten or, if need be, engage other states.  Bottom line, this event is a startling reminder of how the irrational foreign policy choices of the Bush administration have made us dangerously impotent.