Obama administration has done little to save captured journalists

WASHINGTON — It sounds like a movie script: Two California women traverse a foreign country looking to write about oppressed and abused women. The well-intentioned souls disappear without a trace, snatched by government security forces and forced into a world of barren prison cells and mock trials for "espionage."

Yet this is not Hollywood. It is reality for Americans Euna Lee and Laura Ling, who are being held in North Korea.

In the coming days, Lee and Ling are likely to be put on trial in one of the darkest and most unjust places in the world. Two months ago, the San Francisco-based journalists were researching a story for former Vice President Al Gore's television production group, Current TV, about the predatory trafficking of young North Korean women who dare to vote with their feet and escape across the border to China in search of a better life. While reportedly traveling along the Sino-North Korean border, Lee and Ling were accosted by North Korean security police, stripped of any rights and detained on accusations of espionage.

A trial of these two innocent Americans could result in their being sentenced to notorious labor camps that are reminiscent of Josef Stalin's gulags. The North has previously held Americans — such as the crew of the USS Pueblo, captured in 1968, and a U.S. helicopter pilot, detained in the 1990s. The U.S. government eventually secured the captives' release.

Two Korean Americans who crossed into the North in the 1990s were also detained but released.

One of the U.S. president's most important responsibilities is to protect his country's citizens. Yet it appears that the Obama administration has done little to save these women.

To be fair, the United States has no diplomatic offices in North Korea to work on the issue. But there are other, if imperfect, channels, such as working through the Swedes or the Chinese.

Meanwhile, it does not help that North Korea's recent actions — including its test of a ballistic missile last month, its boycott of the six-party talks and its threats to conduct a second nuclear test — have effectively poured cold water on every attempt that President Barack Obama has made to extend a hand to Pyongyang's mercurial leader. This spate of belligerent behavior stems less from anything Obama has done than from the internal fluidity created by the transition process that is apparently underway to replace the ailing Kim Jong Il.