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Freed Current TV journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee arrived with former President Bill Clinton and his team shortly before 6 this morning at Burbank's Bob Hope Airport. The private aircraft went straight to "a heavily secured hangar to meet the waiting crowd, which included former Vice President Al Gore and reporters and photographers," according to LA Now. There Ling, 32, and Lee, 36, were met by their husbands, Lee's 4-year-old daughter Hana, and parents and siblings.
Before former Vice President and Current TV co-founder Gore offered remarks of welcome and appreciation, Ling spoke to the crowd, expressing gratitude to the many people who worked to free her and her co-worker from their captivity and sentence to 12 years in a hard labor camp. The pair had not yet been to the camp, but Ling said she'd thought the day they'd be transferred loomed imminent; it was to their surprise that thirty hours before they landed in Burbank they were escorted to a meeting.
Explains Ling: "We were taken to a location and when we walked through the door we saw standing before us President Bill Clinton. 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."
