N.Korea: US student cries & admits to being "severe criminal" during press conf.

[El Chinito loco]

RE: N.Korea: US student cries & admits to being "severe criminal" during...

They're not going to kill him or sentence him to prison for stealing a banner. Dumbass kid gets a few months in what is probably a decent jail, is publicly humiliated and then released. +1 North Korea.

Maybe. They've done way more for less. It's hard to say what North Korea will or won't do.

They threw journalist Lisa Ling's sister into a dank prison with a 1 year sentence for hard labor for pretty much nothing until Bill Clinton with the U.S. government stepped in to personally bail her out.

Hard Labor in North Korea is pretty scary.

This guy is less than that. He's literally nothing. They will parade him around and try to get some kind of economic concessions out of it. If they can't they'll probably hold him for a long time while he busts rocks or something.

 

[RIslander]

Ling's sister was charged with filming refugees fleeing NK and for entering the country illegally... thats way more of a crime then petty theft. She served one of the 12 years and was accommodated in a guesthouse.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_imprisonment_of_American_journalists_by_North_Korea

Because the United States has no diplomatic relations with North Korea, the contact was handled through the Swedish ambassador in Pyongyang, Mats Foyer, who also visited the two reporters.[20][21] Han Park, a professor of political science at the University of Georgia, went to North Korea to negotiate their release, but Hillary Clinton refused to say whether Park traveled on behalf of the U.S. government. Park stated that the two journalists were staying at a guest house and had not been transferred to prison.

 

[El Chinito loco]

RE: N.Korea: US student cries & admits to being "severe criminal" during...

Ling's sister was charged with filming refugees fleeing NK and for entering the country illegally... thats way more of a crime then petty theft. She served one of the 12 years and was accommodated in a guesthouse.

There's more than a few problems with those charges. They were sketchy at best and North Korea was looking for reasons to detain U.S. citizens at the time for leverage against sanctions.

The point is that North Korea really doesn't need a good reason to do anything. They don't operate on any kind of normal reasoning and will go to drastic lengths.

This is a country where the current leader murdered his own uncle with an Anti aircraft gun.

 

[samsamsam]

They're not going to kill him or sentence him to prison for stealing a banner.

How sure are you?

93.6%

I ran the calcs and I think you are off. I got 93.49837214% every little bit helps.

 

[porscheguy]

RE: N.Korea: US student cries & admits to being "severe criminal" during...

Ling's sister was charged with filming refugees fleeing NK and for entering the country illegally... thats way more of a crime then petty theft. She served one of the 12 years and was accommodated in a guesthouse.

There's more than a few problems with those charges. They were sketchy at best and North Korea was looking for reasons to detain U.S. citizens at the time for leverage against sanctions.

The point is that North Korea really doesn't need a good reason to do anything. They don't operate on any kind of normal reasoning and will go to drastic lengths.

This is a country where the current leader murdered his own uncle with an Anti aircraft gun.

And all of this is precisely why we should feel no sympathy for any foreigner with any western connection whatsoever, who goes there, makes a wave or two, and then finds them self in a rather fucked up situation. Why do these idiots who venture in to N Korea think we need more proof that the place is fucked up? That's about as smart as jumping off a building to prove that gravity exists when you can just as easily go over to bestgore and watch 100s of videos of people doing the same thing only you won't end up dead or crippled at the end.

 

[Gmac]

Clearly scripted and under duress. Guy is still an idiot for trying to get into North Korea at all.

 

[Suits]

RE: N.Korea: US student cries & admits to being "severe criminal" during...

No First World native English speaker calls legal procedures "fair and square" or prays "to the heavens". No doubt under duress. He is quite eloquent and measured in his speech, though. Must have rehearsed it a thousand times with his life on the line.

That's the thing about East Asians. They have a shocking lack of awareness of how hard exactly it is to speak English properly.

The English textbooks here are all written by locals who have clearly never had a conversation with a native English speaker. They literally teach idioms and phrases that are 90 years out of date. It fills me with fury and dissatisfaction every time I get a text from a girl that includes the phrase "what a pity!"

There's a odd sense of superiority in the East regarding their special ability to speak other nation's languages...except that they can't. It's terribly transparent, as the case above indicates, even to a casual, untrained observer.

 

[Quintus Curtius]

He's likely been subjected to a 48-hour interrogation, with strong physical incentives, let's just say. He's doing what he has to do to get out of there in one piece.

He's a fool, of course, for thinking you can play games with North Korea. That country is no joke and they will not miss a single opportunity to humiliate, coerce, shame, or harm the US, for the slightest reason, real or imaginary.

It's sad and pathetic in many ways.

 

[la bodhisattva]

RE: N.Korea: US student cries & admits to being "severe criminal" during...

Am I the only one who feels no sympathy for this clown?

Are American students still so brainwashed with "hope and change", and "yes we can" that some lone dipshit thinks he can go to an openly hostile country, engage in shit stirring, and not end up in this position?

I hope.

Misguided behavior is misguided behavior. Is it wise for an American to travel to NK without the clandestine backing of CNN, Fox, ABC, CBS, or NBC? No. To deface something while there? Absolutely inexcusably stupid. Who knows what has and can happen[ed] to this man for an idiotic affront to an idiotic law. I am sympathetic to a person who most likely endured torture for committing a ridiculous "crime."

Imagine homeowners in the West were given sovereign rule over their property and you were locked in someone's cellar because while you were visiting you thought Pepsi may just be as good as Coke. That's how crazy NK is.

As for the "hope and change" and "yes we can", if there is one national on this planet that legitimately needs extreme worldwide intervention, it's NK.

 

[El Chinito loco]

North Korea just handed this dumbass 15 years of hard labor.

Now the state department will have to go to extraordinary lengths to secure a reduced sentence or negotiate with economic concessions on the table to free his dopey ass. I said before that North Korea is known for being extremely irrational when it comes to things like this. Fucking around in that country is no joke at all.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/17/w...sentenced.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0

SEOUL, South Korea — An American student who tearfully apologized for trying to steal a political propaganda poster in his hotel in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor for subversion on Wednesday, news agencies reported.

The student, Otto F. Warmbier, 21, an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, was convicted after a one-hour trial Wednesday morning at the country’s Supreme Court, according to The Associated Press, which has a bureau in Pyongyang. The Japanese news agency Kyodo and the Chinese state-run Xinhua agency also covered the conviction and sentencing. There was no immediate report from North Korea’s state-run news media.

The sentence is the latest penalty that North Korea has meted out to a small number of American tourists, missionaries and journalists in recent years for what have been deemed antistate crimes, including accusations of illegal entry and leaving a Bible behind in a hotel.

Mr. Warmbier was detained on Jan. 2 as he was about to board a plane to leave North Korea. In late February, he offered a tearful apology at a government-arranged news conference in Pyongyang, where he said he had tried to take the political poster as a trophy for a member of a church in the United States. It was impossible to determine whether Mr. Warmbier had been coerced into making the statements.

The reports on Wednesday came less than a day after a longtime American diplomat, Bill Richardson, the former governor of New Mexico, met with two North Korean officials in New York to urge Mr. Warmbier’s release on humanitarian grounds.

 

[bacon]

I don't think he will get too much sympathy from the American public with a sentence of 15 years of hard labor. Obviously, this is a pretty serious punishment for the crime but because he is a 21 year old from an Ivy League school it is clear this wasn't a mistake made out of stupidity. He tried to steal a political poster from one of the most authoritative and xenophobic countries in the world and got caught.

He knew not to fuck around with North Korea but impressing some girl's mother with this souvenir justified the risk to him.

I would respect the dude if he was being imprisoned for filming evidence of human rights abuse in North Korea but getting caught for stealing a political poster shows he was only concerned with improving HIS monetary or possibly sexual options.

 

[Chauncey]

RE: N.Korea: US student cries & admits to being "severe criminal" during...

They're not going to kill him or sentence him to prison for stealing a banner. Dumbass kid gets a few months in what is probably a decent jail, is publicly humiliated and then released. +1 North Korea.

Not a bad guess.

 

[AWright]

I do feel bad, when I was younger I did stupid shit but I wasn't in North Korea.

 

[spokepoker]

Didn't they give this same punishment to Lisa Ling?
Is this their go-to punishment for foreigners?

 

[Bushido]

I previously had an opportunity to go to North Korea which didn't work out.

Seeing things like this makes me glad I never went.

15 years of hard labour may as well be the death sentence - especially for a millenial like this one with a weak mind and body. The country is one big concentration camp.

 

[dispenser]

A soft man who expected soft treatment in a barbarian country.
Westerners are children into their twenties these days...

 

[Horus]

RE: N.Korea: US student cries & admits to being "severe criminal" during...

If I were him, I would put a positive spin on the situation and consider it a total immersion Korean language opportunity. And best of all, it will be free of charge!

 

[Buakaw]

RE: N.Korea: US student cries & admits to being "severe criminal" during...

Wait... he literally tried to get an actual North Korean flag? That's not what we meant. That's not what we meant at all.

Did we just fuck this guys life up?

[attachment=30550]

 

[RIslander]

I wouldn't be surprised if he never even broke the law in NK. These people are always looking to pin crimes on US citizens. You'd have to be nuts to travel to NK as a tourist.

 

[El Chinito loco]

RE: N.Korea: US student cries & admits to being "severe criminal" during...

If I were him, I would put a positive spin on the situation and consider it a total immersion Korean language opportunity. And best of all, it will be free of charge!

Someone needs to write a return of kings article about this trolling SJW's and call it a unique cultural North Korean homestay and holistic weight loss program.