Matthew Miller traveled to North Korea and promptly tore up his travel visa. According to the article, he shouted his desire to seek asylum. Additionally, he admitted in an interview that he was “prepared to violate the law of DPRK before coming here. And I deliberately committed my crime.” He has not divulged what the crime was but he has been sentenced to 6 years of hard labor for it. It is unclear, at least to me, if his crime was related to his tearing up his visa. My impression is that they were separate events.
Does the US owe Miller any assistance? US citizens are warned not to travel to NK. If you do travel to a foreign country, you are strongly advised to familiarize yourself with and follow all the laws of that country. Planning to break a law beforehand is a “Very Bad Idea” ™.
I have no problem with the State Department making a gesture of “Release Miller”. Beyond that, I don’t believe that there is much that they can or should do. He made his flea infested bed, he should have to lie in it. (Well, ideally NK shouldn’t have flea infested beds but Miller should have seen that as a predictable consequence of his actions.)
Nobody deserves hard labor in a North Korean prison. Even accepting the North Korean version of events, and he really did want to live in a paradise of juche, I take some pity on whelps who have no idea what they are getting themselves into with respect to horrible authoritarian states.
The US shouldn’t bend over for any extortion-like demands, but we should do what we can to get him released.
ETA: For all we know this guy could be emotionally unbalanced. One surely has to be either a die-hard ideologue or simply touched in the head to fly to Pyongyang to seek asylum.
He took his life in his own hands when he chose to travel there. I take the same position on people that mountain climb or engage in any other thrill-seeking activity. This is not an issue of American prestige; in fact, I think we lose reputation by exerting effort on people like this.
We have negotiated the release of prisoners from many autocratic regimes with pathetic human rights records. So, presumably you can find ample evidence that the U.S. standing in the world suffered because of that. I’d like to see that evidence.
Seriously? Nobody else cares. Granted, if our strategy is “give us back our idiot or we’ll pull the plug on your development aid”, other countries will look at us funny. If we just ask nicely or agree to sell them a shipful of grain nobody will react at all.
I have an extremely limited amount of sympathy for those who travel to foreign lands, break their laws, and then expect to get saved because “I’m an American!”
What about those who allegedly did those things? I would not have much time for a person who did what Bowe Bergdahl was accused of, but I certainly wanted him to get the benefit of the doubt until we could make sure he did them.
I fully get that few people will have sympathy for this character, but I’m not so cold-hearted as to believe that people who have poor judgment ought to spend many years in a North Korean prison.
Hell, I’m not so sure that actual criminals should spend years in a North Korean prison.
I see no particular reason to believe the charges are trumped up in this case. Just because the North Korean regime is nasty, it does not follow that nobody commits real crimes there, and this guy certainly seems to have been behaving very strangely.
So when the North Koreans say they invented their own smartphone, everyone laughs; when Uncle Kim shot a 36 on his first round of golf ever, we chuckle; when they say a college student is a spy who caused a minor disturbance in the airport, you say, “Seems legit. Let him rot! They wouldn’t lie about that!”