I don't know what to say to this. The DPRK is evil almost beyond comprehension. If Warmbier harmed himself, surely he did so under the most intense psychological stress you could imagine him being under. He was imprisoned for tampering with a poster. Surely we can all agree that was a terrible human rights abuse. Nobody is (or should be) trying to immunize the DPRK here. Certainly I don't intend to put any of the responsibility for this tragedy on Otto Warmbier; what he did is something I might have done myself were I there at his age!

My point is, as it was downthread, that there's a special recent history to reports of abuses by enemies of the US. If the prevailing narrative about Warmbier's treatment by the DPRK is false, and is exploited by the administration as casus belli, that's not hairsplitting.

Like I said earlier: whatever the US accused the Iraqi Baathist regime of doing, their actual abuses were similarly awful. But in the question of how the US relates to other countries, the distinction matters.

Candidly, I think the debate about US/DPRK relations is (on HN) less important than the debate about what it means to report on these stories and to challenge a popular narrative. If I've been triggered to respond by anything in this thread, it's the subtext (in many comments here) that the reporting in this GQ piece is slapdash or done in bad faith.