The DPRK is quite literally at war with the US, which is actively trying to turn it into another Libya. The state can chill out and become Belgium when they don't have bi-annual war games planning an invasion against their country.
I mean this with no disrespect, but if you come from the West, your police serve capital. There's don't. I get that you're used your police serving the real estate industry and trying to fill quotas for drug crimes, and this is what you see every day.
I mean this with no disrespect, but if you come from the West, your police serve capital. There's don't. I get that you're used your police serving the real estate industry and trying to fill quotas for drug crimes, and this is what you see every day.
Right, but in this case it seems they set upon him for no good reason, at least according to what redline said in this thread
If a cracker from the Hitler country was fucking around and not following the standards by which a guest in the country is expected to do then it's his fault. I get that to him from his perspective it would've seemed like such a nothingburger, and that we as members of the imperial core may sympathise with him at first, but he broke into a military section of the extravagant hotel he was staying at in order to steal this poster. It's sad that he passed during due to unrelated complications, but if he wanted to not be arrested he shouldn't have broken into the military wing of a country his homeland has been nothing but hitlerite towards.
And I mean unrelated, his medical complications were not due to his treatment (perhaps stress, to be fair) and the medical treatment I've read had been some of the best available to the DPRK despite embargo due to the ultimately political nature of his situation. Don't cry too hard though, US Congress has authorized that his parents are entitled to roughly 500 million dollars worth of the DPRK's economy if it ever "liberalizes".
The relevant question isn't "did he break the law", but "did NK mistreat him, or neglect him in custody, causing his illness"? I haven't seen any evidence they caused his illness through mistreatment, and it'd be pretty much impossible to prove so long after the fact if they did, unless said mistreatment involved broken bones or something. But what is much more believable is him being assaulted, perhaps strangled, by other prisoners upon incarceration, which would explain the "lack of oxygen to the brain" that the coroners report mentioned.
The DPRK authorities have some responsibility, if they are going to imprison him, to make sure that doesn't happen, IMO. It would fall under neglect. I mean either way he's no martyr, I certainly don't condemn the DPRK for it, but I think it's fair to say they could have handled it better. If this were one case out of dozens, or hundreds, of americans getting arrested in the DPRK, and one guy happens to get sick and go into a coma in custody, I'd be happy to accept it was coincidence or just stress, but it's not a common occurrence for an american to go to prison there, and americans are (rightly) hated there, so it's sorta hard to accept a healthy US college student just abruptly went into a vegetative coma with no acute cause besides stress when there are so many other possibilities that seem much more likely and simple.
You are correct, so the medical information gathered on him was from when he was still alive plus superficial examinations (turns out he had a scar on his foot and his teeth were crooked)
Otto Warmbier’s family asked Dr. Lakshmi Sammarco, a neuroradiologist and the elected coroner, not to perform a complete autopsy, but rather merely to conduct an external inspection of the body [3,16-18]. The family did not offer a reason for their objection [19,20].
A guy from a country that's bombed and killed 20% of their civilians, used biological weapons against them, and regularly sabotages them, stole something to bring it back to his fraternity. It's literally on video. I don't think he deserved 15 years of hard labour, but I don't blame the Koreans for suspecting that it wasn't yet another US military project. The US would happily turn the DPRK into Syria. As Stephen Gowans has said, the country is constantly on high alert from all the random bomber missions and aircraft fleets that Amerika threatens with the explicit intent of destabilising and draining the DPRK.
The reason was that he was acting like a suspicious cracker from a country that sends almost nothing but suspicious crackers there. 95% of Americans who go to the DPRK are either feds or fed associated journalists who want to smear the place. So this suspicious cracker breaks into a military section of a hotel, is told to go back to his room, does so but then sneaks back to the military wing to do something fucky with a poster.
They were really harsh on him, but acting like a spy while being the exact type of person who would be sent to the DPRK as a spy isn't nothing. The guy was an idiot.
You clearly haven't retained anything about the case. As you can even see from the picture, he was not beaten to a coma in his arrest, and later on even gave testimony (not that the testimony was particularly valuable) that was video recorded and broadcast on TV. He fell into a coma after that point. There is zero evidence that his comatose state was related to police brutality, with even his own parents, with full access to his medical records from his vegetative return on, had nothing to cite proving the coma was induced by torture except him having a scar on his foot that they didn't know about and some crooked teeth. No evidence of fractures, no bruising, no dislocations, no chipped teeth, no signs of concussion, nothing.
He most likely contracted botulism, which is more prevalent in the DPRK due to its poverty, or a similar disease while in custody. Because the DPRK had a limited ability to identify the disease and to treat it, it was not able to save him before he became vegetative.
Nowhere in this story is there room for "pigs did a guy to death". The DPRK handling of some jackass US dude flagrantly breaking their laws and trespassing in a military space was humane by all available evidence.
Would you also like to know if I would change my view if they domed him because they saw his last name and assumed he was Jewish? Imagining counterfactuals is useless when you are refusing to engage with reality.