I’m sure most Americans don’t know that travel into North Korea isn’t forbidden. If you visit South Korea’s capital, Seoul, you can take day trips into the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone) and even further. Not that any sane person (IMHO) would want to travel north of Seoul.

Last year I spent several days in Seoul. It was a poignant experience after reading Chol-hwan Kang’s The Aquariums of Pyonyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag. The contrast between Seoul and Pyonyang is unimaginable until you’ve been there. I thought about writing a review of the book for Amazon—and I don’t know why I didn’t; maybe it’s too gut-wrenching. I’m not sure I can explain the experience.

• Sidebar: During my visit to Seoul, North Korean agitators were stirring up anti-American feeling by spreading rumors about imported American beef. Everyone in South Korea knows that the North Koreans have special ops throughout the South.

The detention of Laura Ling and Euna Lee in Pyonyang, though, seems to make the discussion essential now.

The Story of Laura Ling and Euna Lee

This is a very strange story. I haven’t heard a logical presentation of it anywhere. The women weren’t “captured” by the North Koreans. They didn’t have to sneak across the border. It’s done every day, especially by Asians. Chinese are welcomed there. Japanese Communists were once a large minority group in North Korea.

The State Department’s response, too, seems inappropriate, especially given the obvious fact that the North Koreans only detained the two women because they want America’s attention. Why not just give it to them? The North Korean government is behaving like an infant strangling a kitten because Mommy isn’t in the room. The multilateral talks were working during the Bush Administration; but now a new President has chosen simply to ignore North Korea. (Ignoring is very different from acknowledging that the problem is largely an Asian problem.)

Americans don’t understand that North Korea is frozen in time: it’s 1952 there. The population is kept completely isolated from the rest of the world. They have no idea that the war is over, even though a treaty hasn’t been signed. They are at war with America.

North Korea has NO economy, NO industry, NO farming—nothing. There’s a perpetual famine. They have no oil or gas and need little, because they have few vehicles with internal combustion engines other than trucks left over from the Korean War era. They have no trains to speak of outside Pyonyang. So, even if they had goods to transport inside the country, they couldn’t transport them.

Pyonyang is like the Emerald City, and Kim Jung-Il is the Wizard of Oz. Only special, privileged people are permitted to live in the Emerald City. If you utter a single “discouraging word,” you’re spirited away in the middle of the night (as was Chol-hwan Kong at age 10) to a “work camp” so monstrous it makes some of the Nazi concentration camps seem tenable. I say this advisedly: the North Koreans aren’t engaged in genocide; they don’t want their detainees to die—they want them to suffer unimaginably for as long as possible so that eventually they will join the sing-along.

So, the threat of ten years in a work camp for Laura Ling and Euna Lee is a promise of ten years’ torture.

Current TV

Then there’s the peculiar fact that Laura Ling and Euna Lee were sent to North Korea by a cable TV channel startup called Current TV owned by former VP Al Gore.

Given that the Clinton-Gore Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, had such a good relationship with Kim Jung-Il, wouldn’t you expect Mr. Gore to try to establish personal contact with the North Koreans on his employees’ behalf? Maybe that’s all the attention the North Koreans need from America. Maybe they would release the two women as a personal favor to their old friend.

Kim Jung-Il, Movie Mogul

I have another theory, and as ludicrous as it sounds I’m quite serious. Kim Jung-Il’s dream is to become an international movie producer and recognized director. He even kidnapped a director once and forced him to make a film with him. Both North and South Korea have large film industries.

It seems to me that Kim Jung Il may be detaining these beautiful women for their on-camera potential.

It also seems to me that all America would need to do—to gain the women’s release AND to end the nuclear standoff—is offer to build a massive movie studio in North Korea with all the latest technology.

I’m quite serious. Give North Korea Universal Studios.