The Warmbiers sue North Korea

WHILE THE WORLD IS AGOG AT THE SIGHT OF KIM JONG-UN’S impersonation of a human being, Fred and Cindy Warmbier wish to remind you of his true character by sharing with you what their son—or what was left of him—was like when he came home from North Korea. Yesterday, they filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia against the North Korean government for the wrongful death of Otto Warmbier. I downloaded the complaint from PACER.

Warmber v DPRK

An excerpt:

38. Otto’s parents were at the airport in Cincinnati when the plane carrying Otto landed. When they arrived on the plane, they were stunned to see his condition. Otto was blind and deaf. He had a shaved head, a feeding tube coming out of his nose, was jerking violently and howling, and was completely unresponsive to any of their efforts to comfort him. They also noticed that his once straight teeth were now misaligned and had been forced into abnormal positions, particularly in the front of his mouth.

39. Otto was transported to the medical center at UC Health where physicians conducted a number of tests. Based on those tests and their observations, they concluded that he was severely brain damaged and that his condition was unrecoverable. They also concluded that his extensive loss of brain tissue was caused by an earlier hypoxic-ischemic brain injury caused by the cessation or severe reduction of blood flow to the brain. When Otto originally traveled to North Korea, he was a healthy and physically active young man and had no physical condition that would cause the cessation or severe reduction of blood flow to the brain that occurred while he was in North Korean custody.

At the crux of the Warmbiers’ case is a chronology of motive and causation. The regime in Pyongyang took him as a hostage days before its January 2016 nuclear test, and then inflicted ultimately fatal wounds on him to punish the U.S. government and President Obama for subsequently signing the NKSPEA, pushing for U.N. Security Council Resolution 2270, signing Executive Order 13722, and publishing a round of sanctions designations. I offered a chronology and a similar theory in this post, shortly after Warmbier’s “release.” A key detail revealed in the complaint lends support to that theory:

40. A highly incomplete set of medical records that arrived from North Korea with Otto showed that brain damage existed on a scan dated April 2016, a month after his trial.

And of course, this (and often, far worse) happens to uncounted North Koreans every day, year after year, beyond the reach of our sight and our concern.

But perhaps for one American family, there will be justice of a sort. The designation of North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism opens the gates for more suits for Pyongyang’s acts of “torture, extrajudicial killing, aircraft sabotage, hostage taking,” and material support to terrorists, under the terrorism exception to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act.((North Korea has repeatedly provided support for acts of international terrorism. President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008. President Trump re-listed it on November 17, 2017. Discuss among yourselves.)) The Warmbiers are the latest of many American plaintiffs to sue North Korea for its terrorism or torture — from the Rev. Kim Dong-sik to the victims of the Lod Airport Massacre, to the tortured, defiant crewmen of the U.S.S. Pueblo. The total amount of all of these judgments combined was approaching $1 billion when I last added them up a few years ago.