Tag: Otto Warmbier

President Trump is confirming that they did not pay North Korea any money for the release of Otto Warmbier:

U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday said the United States did not pay any money to North Korea as it sought the release of Otto Warmbier, a day after a report said Trump had approved a $2 million bill from Pyongyang for the American student’s care.
“No money was paid to North Korea for Otto Warmbier, not two Million Dollars, not anything else,” Trump wrote in a tweet.
The Washington Post reported on Thursday that Trump had approved payment of a $2 million bill from Pyongyang to cover its care of the comatose college student, who was held in a North Korean prison for 17 months until June 2017.
Warmbier, a University of Virginia student from Ohio visiting North Korea as a tourist, was imprisoned in January 2016. He was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor for allegedly trying to steal an item with a propaganda slogan from his hotel, North Korean state media said.
Warmbier died six days after his release from North Korea. An Ohio coroner said Warmbier died from a lack of oxygen and blood to his brain. North Korea, which has dismissed claims that it tortured the student, blamed food poisoning and a sleeping pill.
The Treasury Department received the bill from North Korea and it remained unpaid through 2017, the Post reported. It was not clear whether the administration paid the invoice later.

Yahoo News via a reader tip

You can read more at the link, but the real story is the media narrative being created by the Washington Post that originally published the article. Instead of getting a response from the Trump administration on if they paid for Warmbier’s release they write an article implicating that Trump paid “ransom” money for Warmbier’s release. Later after the news cycle has moved on and White House denies any payment, far fewer people see this news.

The Warmbier case is clearly taking a backseat to the larger US goal of trying to get North Korea to denuclearize:

Donald Trump took Kim Jong Un’s word that he knew nothing of the torture of an American college student while in North Korean custody, an about-face that sparked a bipartisan backlash back home on Thursday.
The US president appeared to side with the reclusive leader about the 2017 case of Otto Warmbier, drawing outrage from incredulous Democrats who accused Trump of repeatedly aligning with tyrants.
The 22-year-old Ohio native was returned to the United States in a coma and died shortly afterwards. A US judge concluded Warmbier was tortured by North Korean authorities.
At the conclusion of his Hanoi summit with Kim, Trump told reporters he talked with Kim about the “horrible” Warmbier case.
“He knew the case very well, but he knew it later,” Trump said, adding that “some really bad things” happened to Warmbier while he was detained.
Kim “tells me that he didn’t know about it, and I will take him at his word.”

AFP

You can read all the so called outrage from the usual suspects at the link.

KCNA: "Anyone, who values truth in sincerity, should instead ask for an investigation into the cause of Warmbier's sudden death soon after his arrival in the U.S., whose health indicators were all normal at the time of his release."

— Jonathan Cheng (@JChengWSJ) October 27, 2018

I feel really bad for the parents of Otto Warmbier who have been stuck watching all this adulation given to Kim Jong-un like he is some kind of beacon hope and statesman when the fact of the matter is he is simply a thug ruling a Soprano State.  What was done to Otto Warmbier is just a recent example of this:

Her voice cracking with emotion, the mother of college student Otto Warmbier who was sent home from North Korea in a coma and died soon after said Thursday her family will keep speaking out about the country’s human rights violations to “rub their noses” in what they did and embarrass Kim Jong Un’s government.

Cindy Warmbier told a U.N. symposium on the human rights situation in North Korea: “I can’t let Otto die in vain. … We’re not special, but we’re Americans and we know what freedom’s like, and we have to stand up for this. We have to.”

Her comments came at a sensitive time, as Kim and President Donald Trump are planning a historic meeting, and a day after the U.S. leader hinted at the imminent release of American prisoners being held in North Korea.

A week ago, Cindy and her husband Fred Warmbier filed a wrongful death lawsuit against North Korea, saying its government tortured and killed their son. The lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., seeks compensation for the death of their 22-year-old son in June 2017.

Otto Warmbier, who was a student at University of Virginia, was arrested by North Korean authorities in January 2016 for stealing a propaganda poster and sentenced to 15 years in prison with hard labor.

His plight compounded tense U.S.-North Korean relations. His parents made clear Thursday that while they were silenced by fear of what North Korea might do to Otto after his arrest, they were not going to be quiet any longer.

“We woke up and we realized that North Korea wants us to lock ourselves in a room and do nothing, and we think that’s a bad idea,” Fred Warmbier said.

Fred said he and Cindy are now focusing on the events that occurred “while they had Otto hostage and they were using him as a pawn.”

“We are trying to build a pathway that leads directly to Kim and his regime to force them to be answerable for their actions,” he said.

Cindy Warmbier said Otto was brain dead at four months of captivity, and anyone who had a heart would have said, “Well, we screwed up, let’s get him some medical care.”

But instead, she said, the North Koreans left him in a horrible place with no care to vegetate, and then acted “like we’re doing the world a favor” and released him saying he had botulism — which U.S. doctors never confirmed.

“So we can’t be quiet can we?” Cindy said. “People say why are you doing this? How can I not? How can I not? How can anybody be quiet when this is going on?”

“The only thing we can do is rub their noses in this. It embarrasses them. They don’t like the world to think that they aren’t trying to be a member of the world, and they like to act like a victim, like they’ve been treated poorly,” she said.

North Korea is back to its old tricks: Who, us? Human rights abuses? https://t.co/wN5hmG4tBz

— Anna Fifield (@annafifield) February 16, 2018

As I have said before I have little sympathy for people who travel to North Korea fully knowing the risks of being used as a pawn by the Kim regime.  With that said he did not deserve what happened to him and I feel very bad for Otto Warmbier’s parents to have to deal with such a traumatic death for their son:

The parents of Otto Warmbier, the U.S. student North Korea detained and who died soon after returning home in June, have described the horrific details of his condition.

Fred and Cindy Warmbier disclosed to Fox News on Tuesday what the communist state did to their son and criticized the country for claiming to be a “victim” of the United States’ push for war.

Fred described North Korea as “terrorists” and said they kidnapped and tortured Otto.

The student’s family saw him when they went aboard an air ambulance on June 13. But Otto’s mother and sister left the plane in shock at the initial sight. They said Otto had a shaved head, a feeding tube in his nose, was blind and deaf and was staring blankly.

The father said Otto also had a large scar on his right foot and a high fever.

“It looked like someone had taken pliers and rearranged his bottom teeth,” Cindy said. “We could not call it a coma and were not prepared (to see Otto in such a horrific condition).”  [Korea Times]

You can read more at the link, but unfortunately we will probably never fully know what happened to Otto Warmbier in North Korea.

Citizens visit a memorial altar set up for the late American college student Otto Warmbier at a square in front of Busan Station in the South Korean port city on June 29, 2017. The 22-year-old University of Virginia student died six days after he returned to his home in Ohio in a coma from a 17-month detention in North Korea for allegedly stealing a political poster from a hotel. (Yonhap)

Crowd at Otto Warmbier's funeral rose to applaud Joe Yun, @StateDept special rep who collected him from North Korea https://t.co/lQimusoOZE pic.twitter.com/aSREMhi4Q3

— Anna Fifield (@annafifield) June 22, 2017

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but it is always amazing how little shame the North Koreans have even after the most outrageous provocations they commit such as the killing of Otto Warmbier:

North Korea on Friday called itself the “biggest victim” in the death of an American student who was detained for more than a year and died days after being released in a coma.

The North’s official Korean Central News Agency denied that North Korea cruelly treated or tortured Otto Warmbier and accused the United States and South Korea of a smear campaign that insulted what it called its “humanitarian” treatment of him.

The comments published by KCNA were North Korea’s first reaction to Otto Warmbier’s death in a U.S. hospital Monday after it released him for what it called humanitarian reasons.

Doctors at the hospital said Warmbier had suffered a severe neurological injury from an unknown cause. Relatives say they were told the 22-year-old University of Virginia student had been in a coma since shortly after he was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor in North Korea in March 2016.

His family and others have blamed North Korea for his condition.

Warmbier was accused of stealing a propaganda poster. Through statements on KCNA, North Korea said it dealt with him according to its domestic laws and international standards.

“Although we had no reason at all to show mercy to such a criminal of the enemy state, we provided him with medical treatments and care with all sincerity on humanitarian basis until his return to the U.S., considering that his health got worse,” the agency quoted an unidentified Foreign Ministry spokesman as saying.

The spokesman said “groundless” speculation of torture and beatings could be refuted by American doctors who came to North Korea at the time of Warmbier’s repatriation and “recognized that his health indicators like pulse, temperature, respiration and the examination result of the heart and lung were all normal.” The report did not mention Warmbier’s neurological status.

“The fact that Warmbier died suddenly in less than a week just after his return to the U.S. in his normal state of health indicators is a mystery to us as well,” the spokesman said.

“To make it clear, we are the biggest victim of this incident and there would be no more foolish judgment than to think we do not know how to calculate gains and losses,” he said.  [Associated Press]

You can read more at the link.