a kid got years in North Korean prison for stealing a poster

The full story of this kid was far crazier than the post implies. (https://archive.is/kyR8h)

Firstly, he wasn't in jail for years. He was in jail for 17 months, largely due to the chill relations between the Obama government and North Korea during that time. It is common for US expats to receive special release with a bit of glad handing and brown nosing from a US diplomat, and the fact that Bill Richardson wasn't able to secure Otto's release was the exception rather than the rule.

But secondly, and much more curiously, the story spun up after his release looked more and more like a fabrication the deeper journalists probed.

The previously unreported detail of when Otto was admitted to the Friendship Hospital changes the narrative of what could have happened to him. If Otto was “repeatedly beaten,” as the intel reports suggested, it would logically have been during the two to six weeks between his sentencing, when videos of him showed no signs of physical damage, and “April,” as the North Korean brain scan was dated. But Otto was apparently unconscious by the next morning. The coroner found no evidence of bludgeoning on Otto's body. And when one takes into account that the entire sourced public case that Otto was beaten derives from that single anonymous official who spoke to The New York Times, the theory begins to crack.

It is for this paucity of evidence that, though the public discourse about Otto's death has long been dominated by talk of beatings, there have been doubts among North Korea experts that the intelligence reports were correct. Of the dozen experts I spoke to, only a single one thought there was even a remote likelihood that he had been beaten. “I don't believe Otto was physically tortured,” Andrei Lankov said in his office in Seoul. “The campaign to make Otto a symbol of North Korea's cruelty was psychological preparation to justify military operations.”

Many experts pointed out that though North Korea is often portrayed as irrational, the Kim family had to be “both brutal and smart,” as Lankov said, to maintain its relative power on the world stage, especially for such a small, impoverished country. What incentive would they have to lose a valuable bargaining chip, especially when they had never been so thoughtless before? To these experts, it made much more sense that Otto was treated like all other detained Americans and that an unexpected catastrophe occurred. But despite the experts' doubts, none of them could disprove the intelligence reports indicating that Otto had been beaten. However, a senior-level American official who reviewed the reports told me, “In general, the intel reports were wrong, as the medical examinations have shown. They were apparently not even correct about where Otto was or when he was beaten, for God's sake. Likely, the reports were just hearsay. Someone heard third- or fourth-hand that Otto was sick, and that person decided he was beaten. The North Koreans have never tortured a white guy physically. Never.” The official said he did not know of the Trump administration having other sources of information about Otto being beaten.

So you had a US expat detained for an extended period, only to be released into US custody as an attempt by the NK government to curry favor with Trump. But in the process of being released, Otto falls into a vegetative state with no evidence of physical violence perpetrated against him. The poor state of his health is conveyed to the Trump administration and immediately poisons relations with the new administration.

And over the next several months, Trump begins to ratchet tensions with North Korea as a potential prelude to war.

How did this happen? Who did it benefit?