Thread by @prolewiki

Liberals want to revive the Otto Warmbier story. Let's revive it, then. The DPRK is blameless in this story. The US gov? Not so much. A short thread 🧵

Warmbier was part of a tour group that visited the DPRK in 2015. Shortly before his departure from the country, he was held from leaving by security officials. A trial opened soon after.

The charge brought against Warmbier was that he had stolen posters from a closed-off area in the hotel he was staying at, the Yanggakdo International Hotel. In other words, he was trespassing.

The evidence presented at the trial showed video evidence of Warmbier stealing the poster. You probably know this photo very well, which was often presented in the western media as a set-up, because you can't see Otto's face.

Yet, this still is from a video CNN made for their own website, with footage from the trial. Warmbier is clearly visible, yet this frame was not deemed important enough to make articles on in western media. (As for the grainy quality, that's what happens when you film a monitor)

Shortly after his sentence, Warmbier fell ill and eventually became comatose. He was then brought back to the US in 2017, where he died shortly after. An indictment of the quality of medical care in the US?

Possibly, because the physicians that examined Warmbier noted that he did not present bedsores, a condition common with comatose or bed-ridden patients: this means that his Korean physicians took care to reposition his body every few hours and massage his muscles.

Warmbier also received IRMs in the DPRK showing brain damage. This was a great argument for the US to say that Warmbier had been tortured into this state. Except...

His doctors in the US did not find any evidence of torture or mistreatment (such as healed fractures). However, Otto's parents, who had been in contact with the Obama (then Trump) administration suddenly did not want any more analyses, and soon decided to remove his feeding tube.

His parents also refused an autopsy after his death, and the coroner could only perform a quick non-invasive scan, to which he said he had found no obvious signs of torture.

Why would the parents suddenly refuse to know what happened to their son, and let him die with this question still hanging? Well, for that we have to turn to the US Congress.

In 2018, Warmbier's parents sued the government of the DPRK. This normally is not allowed, as the trial took place Washington D.C, but the US Congress had set up a fund which can pay out successful plaintiffs. And suddenly, the story takes a much different turn:

A kid unfortunately fell ill while travelling abroad, received top medical care, was eventually repatriated (health permitting), died while in his home country, and the US gov paid the parents to shut up and say the DPRK tortured their son.

That's the story of Otto Warmbier.

There's lots of things we had to leave out to keep this thread short, but if you learned something, please leave a like! We will certainly go into the interference of the US gov in Korea (both North and South) in another thread.

en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Korea