Happy, Happy Day today!! Yesterday we learned that President Bill Clinton made his way to North Korea to meet with their supreme leader Kim Jong-il to orchestrate the pardon and release of two jailed US journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, who were sentenced to 12 years hard labor on trumped up charges of trespassing and have been incarcerated for the past 4 months. Happily we learned late yesterday that President Clinton, Ling and Lee had left North Korea and were already making their way back home to the US. This morning, at about 5:30AM PT, they arrived at Bob Hope Airport in Burbank, CA to their families, friends and the waiting press. They’re finally free, y’all!

Former President Bill Clinton arrived in Los Angeles Wednesday morning after a dramatic 20-hour visit to North Korea, in which he won the freedom of two American journalists, opened a diplomatic channel to North Korea’s reclusive government and dined with the North’s ailing leader, Kim Jong-il. The private plane, carrying Mr. Clinton and the journalists, Laura Ling, 32, and Euna Lee, 36, landed at 5:50 a.m. Pacific Standard Time at Bob Hope Airport in Burbank, just outside Los Angeles. The two women stepped off the plane in jeans and sweaters, rushing down the stairs to be reunited with their families, who clustered around them. Ms. Lee, in tears, picked up and embraced her 4-year-old daughter, Hana. Mr. Clinton stepped off the plane a few moments later, embracing Al Gore, the founder of the media company that employs the journalists. “Thirty hours ago, Euna Lee and I were prisoners in North Korea,” Ms. Ling said in brief remarks to reporters, blinking back tears. “We feared that at any moment we could be prisoners in a hard labor camp. Then suddenly we were told that we were going to a meeting. “We were taken to a location and when we walked through the doors, we saw standing before us President Bill Clinton,” she said, recounting the final moments of her ordeal. “We were shocked, but we knew instantly in our hearts that the nightmare of our lives was finally coming to an end. And now we stand here home and free.” Mr. Gore then spoke. “President Obama and countless members of his administration have been deeply involved,” in the effort to bring the women home, he said. “To everybody who has played a part in this,” he said, “we are so grateful.” The North Korean government, which in June sentenced the women to 12 years of hard labor for illegally entering North Korean territory, announced hours before the jet’s departure from North Korea that it had pardoned the women after Mr. Clinton apologized to Mr. Kim for their actions, according to the North Korean state media. Mr. Clinton’s wife, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, said Wednesday that the administration was “extremely excited” that the women would be reunited with their families. But she denied that her husband had apologized. President Obama, who contacted the families of the women on Tuesday evening, said that he, too, was “extraordinarily relieved” at the journalists’ return. “I want to thank President Bill Clinton — I had a chance to talk to him — for the extraordinary humanitarian effort that resulted in the release of the two journalists,” Mr. Obama said outside the White House on Wednesday morning. Mr. Clinton’s mission to Pyongyang was the most visible by an American in nearly a decade. It came at a time when the United States’ relationship with North Korea had become especially chilled, after North Korea’s test of its second nuclear device in May and a series of missile launchings. It ended a harrowing ordeal for the two women, who were stopped on March 17 by soldiers near North Korea’s border with China while researching a report about women and human trafficking. They faced years of imprisonment in the gulag-like confines of a North Korean prison camp. And it catapulted Mr. Clinton back on to the global stage, on behalf of a president who defeated Mrs. Clinton in a bitter primary campaign last year, and who later asked her to be his secretary of state. Mrs. Clinton was deeply involved in the case, too. She proposed sending various people to Pyongyang — including Mr. Clinton’s vice president, Al Gore — to lobby for the release of the women, before Mr. Clinton emerged as the preferred choice of the North Koreans, people briefed on the talks said. About 10 days ago, these people said, Mr. Gore called Mr. Clinton to ask him to undertake the trip. Mr. Clinton agreed, as long as the Obama administration did not object.

Wow … what a happy ending to what could’ve been such an outrageously tragic tale. Thankfully, both Laura Ling and Euna Lee seem to be in relative good health and spirits … considering the months of captivity they spent in North Korea, well, I’m just glad to see them looking so well. The photo of Euna being reunited with her husband and daughter really says it all. I imagine we’ll be hearing much from these two women about their ordeal in the weeks to come … for now, I’m sure they’ll be spending as much time with their families as possible in an attempt to get back to their normal lives — as normal as they can be under the circumstances. President Bill Clinton is a hero in my eyes. This is just such happy news!

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