by Piyush Mathur

A German documentary released in late November claims that North Korea did not physically torture Otto Warmbier—the American tourist who died within a week of his return to the United States following his abrupt release on medical grounds from a North Korean prison. Titled ‘The untold story of Otto Warmbier,’ the film is a Deutsche Welle (DW) production copyrighted to Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR); it is directed by Klaus Scherer. (DW is an autonomous international broadcaster that is owned by the German government; NDR is a Hamburg-based privately owned radio and television broadcaster.) To claim that North Korea did not torture Otto is not unprecedented; but it is still significant because it undercuts a key dimension of this tragedy’s general perception—which took shape in some more or less identifiable stages inside the United States (and whereby outside it).

To start with, Otto’s imprisonment and sentence—to 15 years of hard labour—itself had seemed far too disproportionate to his apparent crime: of stealing a government poster off a wall of the hotel where he had been staying. Next (roughly 2 months after his arrest on January 2, 2016), the Americans saw him issue from North Korea an exaggerated public apology—which could have sounded contemptuous to some—while still being that country’s state prisoner (and they knew that it was nothing if not forced). That was followed (17 months and one week since his arrest) by the television coverage of Otto’s being led in an apparently unresponsive state out of the medical rescue aircraft on his return to the United States—leading up to the news, six days later, of his death under hospitalization. All along, though, the Americans would hear out insinuations and accusations of torture against North Korea from US political operatives, journalists, and Otto’s family and sympathisers. And this evolving perception would get an official public confirmation of sorts in December 2018 in the form of a US court’s order to North Korea to pay more than USD 500 million to Otto’s parents in a wrongful-death lawsuit.

Most of the information related to the Otto Warmbier tragedy had in fact already been available in bits and pieces in the public domain. This information, however, had so far remained overshadowed by political propaganda, opinion, and melodrama inside the United States. This eclipsing of facts related to this tragedy had of course not been helped by the fact that the Ground Zero of this tragedy was the secretive, reclusive territory of North Korea ruled by a notoriously cold-blooded dictator; that Otto’s parents would end up refusing the American authorities the right to conduct a full autopsy (something that the documentary fails to mention); and that the USA would have a bombastic, mercurial president raring to engage in a peculiar brinkmanship with the North Korean leader mainly to buttress his own image as an utterly out-of-the-box American leader. The documentary pulls all that scattered information—prominently including Trump’s complete, ridiculous turnaround on the Otto tragedy—into a singular, dispassionate, audiovisual narrative that comprehensively debunks the accusation of torture, per se, against North Korea (but without letting that country off the hook, either).

What does the documentary reveal?
Aside from putting together prior audiovisual material and research-based findings into a probative narrative, the documentary offers a little bit of re-dramatization and plenty of fresh footage. Most significant within this fresh footage are interviews with these key personalities related to the case: Mike Flueckiger, the emergency physician who had led the medical team tasked to bring Otto back into the United States; Mickey Bergman, a US negotiator; Bill Richardson, a former governor of the US state of New Mexico and a former US ambassador to the United Nations; Lakshmi Sammarco, the Hamilton County Coroner who was in charge of Otto’s case in Cincinnati; Evans Revere, a former US diplomat to South Korea; and Sung-Yoon Lee, an academic at Tufts University.

In the documentary, Flueckiger says that he had received a single paragraph from the United States Department of State indicating that Otto ‘was in a coma at a Pyongyang hospital’ and needed immediate medical evacuation; but when he reached Otto, at the Pyongyang Friendship Hospital, he found the situation to be slightly different:

My first impression was, he was not in a coma.  He was awake.  He had his eyes open.  He was not responsive—purposefully responsive—but he was reactive to noise and touch.  The doctors and nurses confirmed that. [16:33]

Flueckiger conducted Otto’s ‘standard physical exam’—which included listening ‘to his heart and lungs’, checking ‘his eyes, pupils’, and administering ‘a neurologic exam’. Based upon that examination, and his interaction with the North Korean medical team that had received him, he tells the camera the following:

I could not see any signs of torture.  I had the feeling they were forthcoming with their information.  It didn't seem they were hiding anything.  And we examined all of his skin and found no evidence of any skin breakdown.  After hospitalization of that length, that's pretty remarkable.  So, that to me indicated that he got good care; he got attentive care. [18:25-18:52]

As to what had caused Otto’s state of dysfunction, the North Korean medical team had suggested two possible explanations to Flueckiger (17:26-18:08): ‘botulism poisoning’ (given that Otto had consumed pork the day he was sentenced) and/or the ‘two sedatives’ that they had administered him ‘on the night’ he went to prison. While the North Koreans were not equipped to test Otto for botulism, Flueckiger doubted botulism as the source of Otto’s medical challenges; he opines that botulism ‘can cause you trouble breathing’—but this situation does not usually erupt so ‘quickly’ as they had reported it in Otto’s case. Regarding the sedatives, the North Koreans told Flueckiger that they had to give those to Otto because he had got agitated upon being arrested—and that either his body reacted poorly to the sedatives or that they had erred in giving him greater quantities thereof than needed.  ‘They said this themselves,’ Flueckiger points out, as if to underscore the North Koreans’ candour in that regard.

Statements by other unrelated authorities interviewed in the documentary consolidate its claim that Otto had not been tortured. Bill Richardson, for instance, points out that it was not typical of North Korea to torture US prisoners. Sammarco tells us that Warmbier’s fatally ‘severe brain damage’ was caused by oxygen deprivation—but she had found no evidence that this deprivation itself had resulted from torture. And, Evans Revere reveals that he had been personally contacted by a Trump administrator to tell him that there were no signs of torture inflicted upon Otto (and that this administrator had been incorrectly cited by the New York Times—-a citation that had been the basis for Revere’s own prior public statements suggesting that Otto had been tortured).

In a televised statement, Otto’s father, Fred Warmbier, is shown in the documentary saying that ‘it looked like someone had taken a pair of pliers and rearranged’ Otto’s ‘bottom teeth.' This claim was also made, the film points out, in the lawsuit that the Warmbiers would file and win against North Korea (in absentia)—a claim that is repeated in an interview for the film by Lee, who had supported the Warmbiers on behalf of the US government. Through the minutes 31:48-32:08, though, Sammarco dismisses this claim. Going over Otto’s dental X-rays on screen, she points out that her forensic odontologist had found 'no trauma at all’ to his dental roots: ‘And you can't pull teeth out and then rearrange them and put them in different places without there being trauma to the roots.' 

As to the cause of Otto’s death, Sammarco explains (29:53-30:12) that he had suffered ‘severe anoxic encephalopathy’—which is ‘brain damage caused by lack of oxygen to the brain’ for no less than ‘four minutes.'  But, going over Otto’s brain scans (30:38), she rules out that his head had been physically struck. The narrator reports that she suggested that Otto’s ‘oxygen deprivation’ could have been caused by ‘waterboarding, electric shocks, a suicide attempt’ or by either or both of the two possible factors that the North Korean doctors themselves had suggested. She observes the following to the camera (31:02-31:07): 'If they gave him something to sedate him that made him to stop breathing for a period of time, a long enough period of time—absolutely.' 

Yet another claim (28:51-29) that Fred Warmbier had made was that when Otto returned to the US, he ‘had a large scar on his right foot’. Sammarco, however, says in the film (31:18) that her specialists’ findings about that scar ‘were inconclusive'.  She stresses (31:34) the following: 'There is nothing specific about that healed scar.' Apparently against the backdrop of her feeling that her team’s findings had not been given their due by government authorities and fellow Americans, Sammarco belabours her findings regarding Otto’s physical condition as follows (32:09-32:31):

If I had any evidence—and concrete evidence—that there was a criminal act here, I would be very loud about it and would definitely be stating that.  Unfortunately, the evidence we have does not point to anything in particular as far as: This is what happened to him.

She also reveals (32:50-32:53) that she had received 'vaguely threatening' warnings in her mailbox to not release her results—that she was 'being disloyal to the president, and…shouldn't disagree with the president, especially in such a public way.'

As it happens, as the film points out (33:18-33:35), the Warmbiers’ lawsuit against North Korea did not engage either Sammarco or Flueckiger as witnesses; and given that North Korea did ‘not contest the case,’ the trial was conducted ‘with the plaintiffs only,’ comprising ‘government-friendly lawyers and experts’. All in all, this whole torture angle is comprehensively debunked by the documentary—partly by highlighting other false assumptions behind it. For instance, in reference to Lee’s claim (34: 35-34:44) that North Korea had tortured Otto 'to deter the US from military action’, the documentary underscores the fact that the US had had no inkling of Otto’s condition ahead of North Korea’s opening the doors to his medical evacuation.

Concluding remarks
Even though the documentary uses a lot of information that was already available, it does succeed, to a considerable extent, in bringing it into a sharp focus—and thus making it clearer than previously to the public at large anyway. Sure the lack of a full autopsy has ensured that we may never achieve the level of clarity that would have been our due about the exact cause of Otto’s death, we do get a far clearer and coherent picture of the surrounding issues. A conclusive certainty about the cause of Otto’s death might have escaped even a full autopsy, given that he had slipped into his unresponsive state right after he was sentenced—which was roughly 17 months prior to his arrival back into the United States.

But aside from its traumatic aspects, this tragedy had also involved many diplomatic, legal, logistical, and political issues; and this documentary illustrates well the practicalities related to the same. The documentary is thus also a learning experience quite generally; it is just sad that it comes twined into a very painful loss of a young life.

The documentary could be freely accessed here.

Background references

Thompson, Ann (September 28, 2017): ‘Otto Warmbier autopsy contradicts some claims made by his parents’

O’Neill, Marnie (June 21, 2017): ‘THEY are desperate for answers, so why has Otto Warmbier’s family refused a post mortem examination?’

Ortiz, Erik (June 21, 2017) ‘Otto Warmbier’s family objects to autopsy of former North Korean prisoner’

Piyush Mathur is the author of Technological forms and ecological communication: a theoretical heuristic (Lexington Books, 2017). His other publications could be accessed freely here.