Bush meets Kang

This is good to hear:

President Bush met privately yesterday with a well-known North Korean defector who spent 10 years in a prison camp and has since become an outspoken critic of his homeland's government, a move that could provoke Pyongyang just as it was reviving stalled nuclear talks.

Bush invited Kang Chol Hwan, a journalist and director of the Democracy Network Against North Korean Gulag, to visit with him in the Oval Office and recount his tale of suffering in North Korea, where he was arrested in 1977 at age 9 and had to eat rats, cockroaches and snakes to survive. The White House did not list the meeting on the president's public schedule, but a spokesman later confirmed it.

According to aides, Bush has been fascinated with Kang's story ever since he began reading the former prisoner's book, "The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in a North Korean Gulag," published in English in 2001. Bush has recommended the book to senior White House and Bush administration officials, who have been poring through it lately as well.

"He found the book compelling and wanted to talk to the author," said spokesman Frederick L. Jones II. "These are issues that are of great interest to the president -- freedom and democracy."

As the Post story notes, predictable hand-wringing has already begun that this might -- ohmygosh -- upset Kim Jong Il. An editorial in yesterday's Wall Street Journal (no link), however, gets it exactly right:

[Kang's visit] is especially welcome because one of North Korea's diplomatic achievements, if that's the word, has been to use its nuclear saber-rattling to divert attention from its human-rights abuses. South Korea has been only too willing to play along with this public silence, lest pressure build on its government to take in more refugees. Yet when South Korea's current leaders were opposing military rule in Seoul in the 1980s, the U.S. spoke in public on their behalf and in the case of former President Kim Dae Jung probably saved his life. We're glad Mr. Bush is doing the same now for refugees from Pyongyang.