According to the KCNA, those two captured journalists have admitted that they were indeed engaged in a "smear campaign" against the People's Republic:
One video recorder, six tapes, a digital camera and a stone: North Korea laid out its evidence against two American journalists sentenced to hard labor for entering the country illegally.
The country's official news agency reported Tuesday that the journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, documented their journey into communist North Korea, even pocketing a stone to commemorate the illicit trip across the frozen Tumen River from China.
"We've just entered a North Korean courtyard without permission," the Korean translation of their videotape narration said, according to Korean Central News Agency.
Whoops, what a give-away! And why shouldn't we believe the KCNA? Weren't they, after all, the ones who broke the news that Kim Jong-Il, on his first ever round of golf, had hit 5 holes-in-one to finish 38 under par?
KCNA said it released the report to "let the world know crimes committed by Americans at a time when an unprecedented confrontation with the United States has been created on the Korean peninsula."
"The accused admitted that what they did were criminal acts, prompted by the political motive to isolate and stifle the socialist system of the DPRK by faking up moving images aimed at falsifying its human rights performance and hurling slanders and calumnies at it," the agency said.
Meanwhile, in an entirely unrelated development:
The leaders of South Korea and the United States told North Korea to drop its atomic ambitions and stop threatening the region while media reports on Wednesday said Pyongyang was moving ahead with plans to launch a long-range missile.
After a summit with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak in Washington on Tuesday, U.S. President Barack Obama said a nuclear-armed North Korea would pose a "grave threat" to the world. He vowed new U.N. sanctions imposed for North Korea's May 25 nuclear test would be strictly enforced….
Obama vowed to end a cycle of allowing North Korea to create a nuclear crisis, then get concessions in the form of food, fuel and other incentives in return for backing down, only to later see Pyongyang renege on its promises.
"This is a pattern they've come to expect," Obama said. "We are going to break that pattern."
Mick Hartley 
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