What President Donald Trump said this week about Otto Warmbier is bringing down condemnation from all quarters. During a news conference, Trump seemed to be making excuses for Kim Jong-un and the North Korean regime. Trump said that Kim “felt badly.”
He explained “I really believe something very bad happened to him [Warmbier], and I don’t think that the top leadership knew about it.” Trump added, “He [Kim] tells me that he didn’t know about it, and I will take him at his word.”
This is quite a departure from his statements in June of 2017, when he said, “The United States once again condemns the brutality of the North Korean regime as we mourn its latest victim.”
Rob Portman of the Foreign Relations Committee reiterated who should be held responsible for Warmbier’s death. “I want to make clear that we can never forget about Otto. His treatment at the hands of his captors was unforgivable and it tells us a lot about the nature of the regime.”
Warmbier’s parents also criticized the president. “We have been respectful during this summit process. Now we must speak out,” Fred and Cindy Warmbier said in a statement. “Kim and his evil regime are responsible for the death of our son Otto. Kim and his evil regime are responsible for unimaginable cruelty and inhumanity. No excuse or lavish praise can change that.”
It’s very clear that the North Korean story of what happened to Warmbier — that he contracted botulism — was false. Warmbier’s parents reported extreme physical damage to his body, damaged teeth, and scars. The U.S. government said it had intelligence indicated that Warmbier had been “repeatedly beaten” while in custody. But the American coroner who examined him, Dr. Lakshmi Kode Sammarco, gave a press conference , in which she disputed that Warmbier’s condition necessarily showed signs of torture. She said his teeth were in fine condition, and that Warmbier’s brain damage was universal, indicating a lack of oxygen to the entire brain, rather than a blow to the skull which would damage the brain asymmetrically.
A reporter for GQ, Doug Bock Clark, wrote a long feature last year, speaking to doctors and to people who experienced North Korean imprisonment as foreigners. Clark’s story encouraged speculation that Warmbier may have tried to commit suicide to escape the psychological torture that is normally inflicted on foreign prisoners held in North Korea. Warmbier likely endured isolation, constant interrogation, hours subjected to North Korean propaganda. He also faced the immediate prospect of a hard labor sentence imposed on him at the conclusion of a show trial. A show trial for trying to take a poster off a wall as a souvenir of his time in North Korea. Certainly Warmbier’s fate was unusual for American prisoners in North Korea. Most do come home without signs of physical torture. One North Korea expert told Clark that the talk of beatings was “psychological preparation to justify military operations.”
President Trump’s negotiation strategy with the North Koreans, swinging wildly from threats of “fire and fury” to flattery and hope, has induced an inconsistency in his talk about Otto Warmbier. Lining up all of the statements from 2017 with those of today, there is a certain vagueness by American officials about what precisely happened to Otto Warmbier.
But there should be no equivocation about who is responsible for his fate: North Korea, a regime controlled by Kim Jong-un. Even if the American president, for reasons of diplomacy or in the interest of truth-telling, wants to back away from those early leaked intel reports about North Koreans beating Warmbier, he needs to be absolutely clear that Otto Warmbier’s death was caused by North Korea. They had him in their custody. Video of his show trial reveals no physical injuries, but does show him in extreme mental distress – distress consistent with North Korea’s practice of extremely prolonged interrogation and psychological torture. Portman is correct to call this treatment is “unforgivable.” And even a president who is seeking a better relationship with North Korea should be honest about it.