California Libertarian Alliance

Reporters Without Borders is appalled by the sentences of 12 years of “reform through labour” which a North Korean court passed today on American journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee after convicting them in a sham trial of an unspecified “grave crime” and illegally entering the country.

“These 12-year sentences are a terrible shock for all those who have repeatedly insisted on their innocence,” Reporters Without Borders said. “The sentences are much more severe than anything we had imagined. The authorities in Pyongyang must urgently reverse this decision and allow Ling and Lee to rejoin their families.”

Complete statement from Reporters Without Borders @ http://www.rsf.org/American-reporters-get-very-severe.html

James Dorn, Vice-President of Cato Institute, issued this statement on the 20th Anniversary of the Tienanmen Protest:

“After 20 years China has made substantial economic progress, but the ghosts of Tiananmen are restless and will continue to be so until the Goddess of Liberty is restored.”

“The Chinese Communist Party’s “Human Rights Action Plan” (2009-10) addresses several human rights abuses, but it fails to establish a well-defined boundary between the individual and the state that protects rights to life, liberty, and property. Until China limits the power of the CCP and allows people to exercise their natural rights, there will be corruption, and the goal of “social harmony” will be elusive. The lesson of Tiananmen is that the principle of nonintervention (wu wei) is superior to the heavy hand of the state as a way to bring about true harmony. “ 

Source: http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2009/06/04/tiananmen-square-20-years-later/

“PYONGYANG—Here is the locked ward of the political asylum, the place where politics has actually become an official state religion, and power is worshipped, directly and literally, in the form of a colossal bronze idol to which the people come and bow with every sign of reverence. Nothing in the modern world compares with North Korea, though it gives us some clue about how life must have been under the pharaohs, in Imperial Japan before Hiroshima, or in the obliterated years—conveniently erased from memory by blushing fellow travelers—when Josef Stalin was revered as a human god.”

“Pyongyang is the most carefully planned and also the most mysterious city on the planet. You cannot, unless you escape from the warders who accompany foreigners everywhere in North Korea, walk inquisitively along its surprisingly green and spacious streets.”

Peter Hitchens reports from North Korea’s socialist Hell @ http://www.amconmag.com/article/2007/nov/19/00010/