Otto's father said that Chinese tour groups target US college students, making them think that North Korean tours by US college students are routine and safe. They lure them in, then NK arrests some for their own purposes (cruelty, barter with the US, possible Manchurian candidate, etc.).
Our kids are naive, they didn't grow up during the Cold War/Korean War era, and since Communist China has most favored nation status,
http://tech.mit.edu/V114/N27/china.27w.html and we use Russia to launch our astronauts, they don't suspect anything nefarious from a communist country. I don't mean to get political, but it is well known that our universities are left-leaning, and IMO support the belief that communist countries are benign.
We need to wake up our kids.
At this point I have to say where were the parents when this kid told them he was taking a tour to N. Korea?
Any parent with common sense should have shut this down fast but they let him go.
There is a girl that lived near me in a city close by that you might remember was in the news a lot in 2005...Natalee Holloway.
The senior graduation trip from her high school went to Aruba that year and all her classmates came back...except her.
To this day they never found out what happened to her or ever found her body if she was murdered by Joran van der Sloot...which is exactly what most presumed happened.
He is in jail now for murdering another girl a few years later so...
This was a foreign country and his father was rich and well connected so there was little chance justice was ever going to be served in this case.
This was a teenager and her parents thought it was just fine to let her go on this trip to another country.
They figured it would be ok, there were teachers on this trip that were acting as chaperones.
After this happened I had a customer come into my store and she was the mother of another girl in that same class that begged her mom to go on this same trip.
It would be safe, she kept arguing, those chaperones would be there taking care of things after all.
This mom was having none of that, she called the school, the teachers that were going on the trip and anyone else she could find to get more information before she would ever let this kid travel to another country without her.
She found out those chaperones were a joke...the only thing they were responsible for was getting the kids off the plane when they arrived and checking them into their rooms and then gathering them all back up at the hotel to make sure they got on the bus to go back to the airport when they left.
During the entire time there those kids were all basically on their own and could do what they wanted, go where they wanted and get into as much trouble as they wanted to...those teachers really didn't care.
This mother's girl ended up staying home.
That's how you do the parenting thing, due diligence and take nothing for granted.
Kids are still kids and many just have no common sense so the parent must.
Natalee Holloway's mother had her life destroyed because she had none, Warmbier's parents didn't seem to have much more than she did so now they have a lifetime to regret it.