
The Untold Story of Otto Warmbier, American Hostage - gadders
https://www.gq.com/story/otto-warmbier-north-korea-american-hostage-true-story
======
enticeing
I had always thought that he was beaten, I guess because I'd never really
looked into it. From the article it seems like it's most likely that he either
attempted suicide or lost blood flow to his brain in some other way, and then
was discovered by his guards unconscious and taken to the hospital in North
Korea.

~~~
csmckay
Yeah the article mentioned all the North Korean medical paper work showed Otto
went into the Hospital already in a coma the day after he was sentenced.
Furthermore, the article suggest he was well taken care of the entire time
while in his coma (i.e., no bedsores, healthy coma weight, healthy skin etc.).
And it said the original brain scans showed equal distribution of brain damage
on both signs (i.e., he died from lack of oxygen rather than blows to the
head).

I don't think I'd be strong enough to stay in it after being sentenced to a
lifetime of jail in a North Korean prison camp.

The "beatings" and "torture" talk all seems to be false propaganda that wasn't
backed up by any evidence with several officials noting no signs of beatings
or torture, which is disgusting.

~~~
oculusthrift
and north korea has never been known to lie, so must be true

~~~
tptacek
For most of the detail cited in the comment you replied to, we're not relying
on North Korea's representations, so your reply is largely nonresponsive.

------
SomeAmerican
The author dedicates a full section to a possible attempt at suicide. However,
he doesn't even try to correlate that with the physical examinations.

How does one go braindead in a suicide attempt while locked up, without
leaving physical evidence of other injuries?

Certainly, none of the other suicide attempts the author listed would qualify.

Later in the article: "Upon learning that this article did not support claims
that Otto was beaten, and included the theory that he may have attempted
suicide—a possibility that the family, through their lawyer, dismissed
categorically—the Warmbiers withdrew a statement that they had previously
provided."

The "theory" that he attempted suicide is definitely on shakier ground than
the "theories" his injuries were intentionally inflicted on him by the North
Koreans.

~~~
tptacek
I think the implication that he tried to hang or strangle himself is pretty
clear; it's consistent with his injury (symmetric brain damage consistent with
oxygen starvation, no other external signs of injury).

It is certainly possible that, rather than hanging or strangling himself, he
was strangled by someone in the DPRK. The DPRK hasn't done that to any other
US prisoner, but it's the DPRK, so who knows?

The problem is that the narrative in the media doesn't have that uncertainty.
Rather, it's reported (somewhat widely, though less so after the coroner's
report) that there was evidence of physical abuse: scars on his legs,
"rearranged" lower teeth, etc.

It is worth adding that the article doesn't say Warmbier tried to kill
himself; it just adds that to the stack of plausible causes. It is indeed a
very plausible cause.

~~~
pvg
There's a point where the hairsplitting becomes a little unseemly, maybe, even
with the most pigheaded interlocutors? The guy is dead, there's a recording of
him abjectly begging for mercy. Nobody does that other than under duress even
when it turns out the duress was probably not physical and was misrepresented
as such.

~~~
tptacek
I don't know what to say to this. The DPRK is evil almost beyond
comprehension. If Warmbier harmed himself, surely he did so under the most
intense psychological stress you could imagine him being under. He was
imprisoned for tampering with a poster. Surely we can all agree that was a
terrible human rights abuse. Nobody is (or should be) trying to immunize the
DPRK here. Certainly I don't intend to put any of the responsibility for this
tragedy on Otto Warmbier; what he did is something I might have done myself
were I there at his age!

My point is, as it was downthread, that there's a special recent history to
reports of abuses by enemies of the US. If the prevailing narrative about
Warmbier's treatment by the DPRK is false, and is exploited by the
administration as _casus belli_ , that's not hairsplitting.

Like I said earlier: whatever the US accused the Iraqi Baathist regime of
doing, their actual abuses were similarly awful. But in the question of how
the US relates to other countries, the distinction matters.

Candidly, I think the debate about US/DPRK relations is (on HN) less important
than the debate about what it means to report on these stories and to
challenge a popular narrative. If I've been triggered to respond by anything
in this thread, it's the subtext (in many comments here) that the reporting in
this GQ piece is slapdash or done in bad faith.

~~~
pvg
_Nobody is (or should be) trying to immunize the DPRK here._

I didn't say that, if it sounded like I did, sorry!

 _is exploited by the administration as casus belli_

That's a different argument with a higher bar - you can't meet it debating the
state of Otto Warmbier's teeth.

 _it 's the subtext (in many comments here) that the reporting in this GQ
piece is slapdash or done in bad faith._

For what little it's worth, that gets my goat every single time as well.

------
SomeAmerican
Nearing the summation, the author uncritically quotes a "senior-level American
official." \--"The North Koreans have never tortured a white guy physically.
Never.” Earlier in the article, "The 82 American sailors captured on the
Pueblo were beaten and starved for 11 months before finally being released."

Conclusion: either none of the 82 American sailors were white guys, or "beaten
and starved for 11 months" doesn't constitute torture.

~~~
vowelless
It's a men's fashion magazine. I don't expect high quality work on this topic
from them. I just skim to get a salient point here and there.

~~~
tptacek
That's not how this works at all. GQ and Esquire run serious long-form
journalism all the time. For that matter, Vanity Fair is Michael Lewis and
William Langewiesche's home after leaving The Atlantic.

------
jl2718
tl;dr: I’m like, way, smarter than the president, who is a big ugly stupid-
head and everything he does is wrong.

If you want to be taken seriously as a journalist, don’t tie the story back to
your opinion on Trump. It was an interesting story until he reveals the
political motivations behind it. Have the courage to present the facts and let
people come to their own conclusions.

~~~
mthoms
It seemed factual to me. In fact, the Trump administration are given a lot of
credit for the eventual release. It's the _spin_ factor thats being called
into question.

~~~
jl2718
Well, it is factual up to a point, which is great, and then he starts
speculating, which is okay, and then he turns it into some indictment of Trump
for tweeting that he was tortured, and then another indictment for not
attacking more on the same issue. This brings all the weak sources into
question. But really the problem is that I don’t care about his politics. Not
do I care about Trump. I care about the fact that an entire nation full of
people is living in some kind of perverse socialist utopian hell, and this
tragic case is but one glimpse into it.

His name was Otto Warmbier. I will not forget.

~~~
tptacek
You won't forget _what_? The point of the article is that you don't know what
happened to Warmbier, and if your only source of information about him was the
media stories that ran prior to this article, what you might think you know
about him is almost certainly false.

------
throwaway78568
Based on the source, I went in to this article assuming it would somehow paint
North Korea in a more forgiving light, and attack the Trump administration. I
was not wrong.

The whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth. Maybe Otto was physically
beaten, maybe he wasn't. Maybe his incarceration conditions were "good" or
maybe they weren't. Maybe he did try and commit suicide, maybe he didn't. The
author certainly didn't have any more hard, objective facts than anyone before
them. He just had an axe to grind.

~~~
seren
As a non-American, I did not feel it was highly critical of the Trump
administration

> Now, that's not to fault the Trump administration for applying maximum
> pressure on North Korea for an American citizen ending up brain-damaged in
> its custody: Such behavior warrants punishment. Nor is it to imply that the
> senior government official lied to The New York Times about the intelligence
> reports, as some analysts suggested to me; that person seems to have
> correctly described them. But if the maverick boldness that the
> administration displayed in rescuing Otto represents the best of Trumpism,
> what followed once it was clear the reports were flawed encapsulates its
> troubling disregard for facts when a dubious narrative supports its
> interests.

You could say that the last sentence is critical but, Trump or no Trump, any
government is using sometimes dubious arguments for its own interest. Never
let go a crisis go to waste.

~~~
throwaway78568
The author implies that the Otto story was simply a lever for Trump to start a
war with NK. And that when moods change, the Otto story is no longer "useful"
to Trump and so is forgotten. This is more an indictment of the 24 hours news
cycle I think.

He also spends a great deal of time defending the NK hospital procedures and
"likely" incarceration facilities.

I mean, personally I'm repulsed by NK. I'm repulsed that Trump treated their
leader with dignity. I'm repulsed that this story implies that the north
koreans didn't get a fair shake in the press.

~~~
tptacek
The story doesn't imply that DPRK didn't "get a fair shake"; it simply says
that the story spread in the press was _false_. We don't believe falsehoods
simply because we think they should be true.

~~~
joelhoffman
> We don't believe falsehoods simply because we think they should be true.

That sounds like something you believe because you think it should be true :-)

------
6CLfK93jQ8
The author is claiming that the Trump administration "encouraged the
narrative" that Otto Warmbier was beaten but it does not really explain why
very precisely except to imply that Trump may have used Otto's parents to look
better himself. There isn't any evidence he did this, it is just speculation
by the author. I can't find any quote from the Trump administration saying
this except for "intelligence reports" from before Otto's return that even
officials state the reports about beatings were from third or fourth hand
sources. Further, North Korea's official explanation of Otto's brain trauma,
botulism and a sleeping pill reaction, are dubious medical claims and can
therefore be rightly doubted. 6 days after Otto's return, a press conference
was held from Otto's doctor about his condition and reports about torture
could not be confirmed or denied except to state that North Korea's
explanation was unlikely. This would make it very hard to perpetuate a
narrative that Warmbier was, without a doubt, beaten. I think it is an
extremely tedious point to suggest that Trump was deliberately misleading the
public about Otto's treatment in order to make himself look better.

