Before the trial, he admitted to doing it in order to trade it for a $10,000 used car. This is different than the narrative in the confession that North Korea made him sign which suggested he stole it because the American Government made him do it. I believe his original story. I don’t believe North Korea’s version, but I believe the guy went into an unauthorized area of the hotel room and stole a banner.
Purportedly shows Warmbier yanking down the banner. The article goes into why the video may be (likely is?) bullshit.
I can see wanting to see something like the Arirang Festival, just for the pageantry, but yeah, to hell with supporting a slave state.
Let’s look on the bright side. Doesn’t something like this mean Kim wants to deal, and isn’t using things like lobbing IRBMs around, or other military provocations that might actually hurt people, to show he wants a handout?
I just watched a video of this latest prisoner’s court appearance. “Extremely bad acting” would be a compliment to the caliber of acting.
That being said, the only thing Warmbier has to worry about is when will he be released. Like all the others, he’ll never see the inside of an actual North Korean jail, he’ll never be sent to labor camp, and, perhaps like Bae, he’ll get to do some gardening under the guard of his minders.
The time to start worrying about how North Korea treats these individuals who are currently just bargaining chips is when North Korea actually does sentence them to a labor camp for life and really puts them into said labor camp. That means they’ll never be released.
Right now, all we have is SSDD, but with a new player.
The guy is a clown.
Went to a nation run by clowns.
Disposition is straightforward: Send in the clowns
Paging the Rodman entourage…
Look; the kid is not an “adult” except by definition.
He is finding out the hard way 
that the world is a teensy bit more complex than he thought, and that the rest of the world has no mandate to come alongside western notions of how to run a civilization.
The Feds should only try to spring him if he pinkie swears not to head to an Islamic country next and pick up some one night stands with their girls.
My suspicion is if an American did something in North Korea that was egregious enough that they felt the need to put them in a real labor camp, or even execute them (and to be frank I’m not sure what that would be to the regime–they value the propaganda way more than making an example of an American to the local population, but this is speculative) I suspect that person would simply disappear. They’d be reported “missing” from their tour, and the DPRK would never officially acknowledge or elaborate on the matter again. They’d play it off as somehow the person disappeared under mysterious circumstances. There’s some precedent for the North just pretending ignorance when it has held people (from other country’s) in the past that it had no intention of giving back.
You see, that’s kind of hard to do when you herd a group around. Warmbier, like the woman who was shot and killed by a NK soldier at the Mount Kumgang resort, entered NK with a tour group. (And, yes, there is such a thing as a one-person tour group for that country.) Neither Warmbier or Ms. Park Wang-ja was abducted and taken into NK clandestinely. At any rate, the North’s story about what Mr. Warmbier did is obviously just a story; the Norks need something from the outside world and they’re just doing what’s been tried and worked before.
I don’t see what’s so “mixed” about this –
The guy’s an abject idiot for (i) doing what he did; especially in the current political climate relating to DPRK, (ii) for going to North Korea in the first place (why would anyone want to waste the time and money, and expose themselves to the risks, just to be taken on a propaganda tour of an Orwellian hell hole?! :dubious:), and (iii) lying about his motivations (*assuming the ‘C.I.A. made me do it’ angle is as koospiratorially silly as it sounds and does not hold any truth to it – i.e., for it to be use as an instigating factor for more forceful U.S. action in order to thwart the DPRK’s efforts in nuclearisation).
The fact they’re saying he’s going to do 15 years hard labour for this so-called crime - no U.S. citizen has ever done more than a year incarceration in NK… correct? - is par for the course and would have been wholly expected by all parties (*assuming, again, that the guy wasn’t a clinically assayable retardate… which would reflect very poorly indeed on U.S. university entrance standards :dubious:).
It’s an unfortunate set of circumstances the dingleberry brought upon himself and in a year, when he’s likely released (in exchange for some propaganda junket involving Bill Clinton or the like), it will all just be another in a long line of reasons not to visit North Korea!
While I concur that he’s not the brightest bulb in the box, I think he can be given a pass for his statement. He’s young (not a kid though, he an adult) and he’s probably never been under pressure like this in the past. So I can see where he caved and made a statement that was told would keep him from being executed or being tortured.
I don’t know why the U.S. government allows it’s citizens to even go to North Korea. It only gives the DPRK government and opportunity to try and humiliate the U.S., and there is no up side to these visits for the U.S. It’s not like thousands of North Koreans are going to interact with Westerners and learn that their regime is made up of killers and madmen.
Yeah, if I were SECSTATE I would give serious thought to prohibiting all U.S. citizen travel to NK.
I hate to be mean about it, but it would be OK with me if this idiot was kept out of the USA gene pool for life.
Maybe after he is released from NK prison we can get him to continue on to Hong Kong and stay there, or wherever it was he was in transit to before he was overcome by kleptomania in NK, of all the f*cking places.
For those of you calling Warmbier an idiot, why are you calling him that? Is it just because he took a trip to North Korea or because you believe he actually did what the Norks accuse him of doing? If it’s the latter, why would you believe the Norks?
I used to know someone who sold blue jeans on a college-sponsored trip to the Soviet Union, so they’re out there. I don’t know that Warmbier did anything more foolish than go to North Korea, but people that foolish are out there…
I’ve already laid out why I believe him–the North doesn’t have a demonstrated history of detaining Americans on false charges. Of the people detained since 1996 all but one have largely admitted (after their release when they were no longer subject to DPRK control) what they did. Some, like the “journalist” who wanted to infiltrate the North’s prison system or the evangelical from Ohio are proud of flouting North Korea’s laws.
I don’t believe most of the propaganda that North Korea puts out, obviously, that’d be silly. But it appears at least based on past events that the shaping of their propaganda is such that they desire not to totally fabricate charges against Americans. With a few thousand tourists from the West coming into the North every year now, there will always be opportunities to detain people for petty charges when it suits them.
Numb-nuts ought not to have gone to North Korea in the first place. Fucked up stuff happens in fucked up places and North Korea is, by all accounts, fucked upper than shit.
As Martin Hyde said, historically they have not just made things up out of wholecloth. They take a minor violation of their laws and trumpet it to kingdom come. I don’t really believe Warmbier’s staged confession about WHY he did this, that it was related to some nefarious church plot, but actually swiping a sign? Yeah, I think he probably did do that. Because he was thoughtless and naive and didn’t stop to consider that stealing a propaganda sign from a Pyongyang hotel is not the same as stealing bath towels from a podunk B&B in Pennsylvania because they’re embroidered with “Little Intercourse Motel” and it looks funny.
A number of Americans visit North Korea with tour groups, likely out of morbid curiosity, and the vast majority of them behave themselves and get back out again just fine. Complaining that Warmbier’s punishment is “excessive” and horrible is pointless. Well, of course it is, but we know this about North Korea, that these sorts of actions are treated very severely and punished harshly. If you don’t like it and don’t think you can abide by it, stay home. Don’t go there, do the thing, and then complain when the consequence is exactly what you were warned it would be. It’s like going to the UAE and crying when you get arrested for going into a hotel room with someone you’re not married to, or when you wind up sentenced to lashes for being drunk and disorderly in Riyadh, or when you get a huge fine for taking a stupid video of yourself mockingly doing the Nazi salute and shouting “Heil Hitler” in front of the Brandenburg Gate. Their house, their rules.
Visiting other countries is a privilege, not a right, and if you can’t be bothered to look up unusual local laws and prepare yourself, it’s your own fault when you get in trouble. The US government should not be Superman and have to expend political capital to swoop in and rescue people from their predicaments because they thought their passport was a blank check to do what they wanted and ignore laws they thought were stupid or unimportant.
Dumbass is as dumbass does.
US State Department Travel Warning for North Korea
This is the second such warning offered by DoS in 2015, for heaven’s sake. It does come right out and say that you’ll certainly be arrested on some charge or other but it surely implies the possibility in strong terms.
It also goes on to say that the United States has no diplomatic relations with the country and that the DoS won’t be able to help via any normal channels if you get in trouble.
Yes, the kid’s a chucklehead. I’m very doubtful about whether he committed the crime and the punishment seems overboard by my sensibilities. However, there is simply no means by which he wasn’t fully warned without him purposefully dodging the warning.
For fun, here’s the entire list of travel alerts and warnings. I’m heading out on a cruise in a week and only one of the stops is on the list: Mexico. Issued in January and warning me to avoid certain areas due to gang-related activities.
All that said, there are groups that ignore such warnings and alerts when they preach the gospel. They feel the opportunity to spread the word overrides their personal safety. I admire their courage if not their common sense.
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As Martin Hyde said, historically they have not just made things up out of wholecloth.
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You seriously believe that Lil’ Kimmy V2.0 hit 18 holes in one the first time he played golf or that men around the world dress up as he does because he’s revered around the globe? 
Seriously, man…they make up stuff every day out of whole cloth. Nearly everything they say is a lie. While only, say 70-80% of what comes out of Chinese state run media is bullshit, it’s like 99.9999998% in North Korea.
I’m well traveled, and I was never going to North Korea in any event. But after reading that state department alert, I concur with Jonathan Chance. You’re a dumbass if you go.
I do too. Imagine going through life with a name straight out of an Austin Powers movie.
Please, don’t sugarcoat it - tell us how you REALLY feel.