Our hearts go out today to Laura Ling and Euna Lee. The families of the two American journalists are stunned after learning the tragic news that the two women were sentenced to 12 years in a North Korean labor camp.

North Korea’s Central Court on Monday dealt Ling and Lee a horrible blow after they were allegedly caught on the north side of that country’s border with China. The women, who worked for Al Gore’s Current TV, were filming a documentary on female refugees when they were detained in March. They were sentenced for a "grave crime" and illegal entry, with few details released. And there’s little hope for an appeal for Ling and Lee, the latter of whom is a mother of a four-year-old. Both women are married. President Obama’s administration is using "all possible channels" to obtain their release, the White House said early Monday, reports AFP.

"The president is deeply concerned by the reported sentencing of the two American citizen journalists by North Korean authorities, and we are engaged through all possible channels to secure their release," said White House spokesman Bill Burton. Other agencies called for the release of the two women on humanitarian grounds.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the charges were baseless and they should be allowed to return home. Gore may work to personally intervene on the women’s behalf, and Clinton has sent a letter to the North Korean government apologizing for Ling and Lee’s actions — even if they did nothing wrong — just to try to get them home. "It is a humanitarian issue and the girls should be let go," she told ABC News’s "This Week."

Family friends have told ABC News that they hoped any sentence for Ling and Lee would be symbolic and that the women would be allowed to return to the United States. But it seems Pyongyang is committed to making some sort of statement with the harsh sentence as it teases the international community by continuing tests of its nuclear program. Even allied countries such as China and Russia of late have condemned the North’s recent missile tests. The Obama administration on Sunday signaled that it was trying to interdict North Korean sea and air shipments suspected of carrying nuclear weapons or the material used to make them, reports The New York Times.

The U.S. certainly has the support of South Korea on anything aimed at preventing its uneasy northern neighbor from firing off anymore weapons. The United Nations is also considering new sanctions against North Korea for its bad behavior. All of this doesn’t bode well for a calm Korean peninsula.

"Our response [to sanctions] would be to consider sanctions against us as a declaration of war and answer it with extreme hard-line measures," the North’s official Rodong Sinmun newspaper said in a commentary.