Hundreds of thousands of Koreans have been subjected to similar criminal abuse at the hands of North Korea’s Stalinist regime.
I can’ t stop thinking about Otto Warmbier. And the more I think about him, the more I remember all the smart people I’ ve heard over the years explaining why the North Korean regime — the regime that “brutalized and terrorized” Otto, as his father said last week — shouldn’ t be challenged or destabilized.
Warmbier is a smart and immensely likable kid who graduated from high school in 2013 in his hometown of Wyoming, Ohio, and enrolled in the University of Virginia. Toward the end of 2015 he was traveling in China when he signed up, out of curiosity and a sense of adventure, for a four-day New Year’s trip to North Korea. As the rest of his tour group departed from Pyongyang International Airport on Jan. 2,2016, Warmbier was detained.
Two months later he showed up on North Korean television confessing to his supposed offense: trying to pilfer a propaganda poster from his hotel to bring home as a souvenir. We don’ t know if the coerced confession was truthful or made up. Even if truthful, the resulting sentence of 15 years at hard labor was obscene.
Warmbier, who is now 22, wasn’ t seen or heard from again until last week, when the Trump administration managed to secure his release and fly him home to Ohio. Only it turns out that Warmbier is incapacitated, and apparently has been for almost his entire time in captivity.
“His neurological condition can be best described as a state of unresponsive wakefulness, ” said Daniel Kanter, a University of Cincinnati Medical Center neurologist who examined Otto. “He shows no signs of understanding language, responding to verbal commands or awareness of his surroundings. He has not spoken. He has not engaged in any purposeful movements or behaviors. . .. This study showed extensive loss of brain tissue in all regions of the brain.”
We don’ t know whether North Korean guards beat Warmbier into a coma or whether his abuse and maltreatment came in some other form.
