Otto and the Warmbier family are victims not of the North Koreans but of American officialdom, which failed to intervene on his behalf and, if the unpleasant truth be told, wanted him silenced. …
The gaping holes in the story of Otto Warmbier, the American university grad who suffered a severe brain disorder while imprisoned in North Korea, are a source of public puzzlement, since it seems irrational for a tourist to be imprisoned for theft of a mere banner from a hotel wall. The actual issues behind his arrest have been covered over by the Western media and are a confusing issue to Koreans. The undercover role of the ambitious graduate has been swept under the rug, a routine response from the manifold nexus of U.S. intelligence agencies and a Zionist-influenced Treasury Department.
This sad tale of an eager but misguided youth is not the first nor shall it be the last embarrassing episode of bureaucratic bungling, inter-agency rivalry, conflicted foreign policy and international intrigue. A prisoner swap or partial sanctions-lifting in exchange for his early release was never attempted by the Barack Obama administration, which abandoned Warmbier in his hour of need.
The imprisonment, along with the further advance of the brain disease that killed Otto Warmbier, casts a searing spotlight on the U.S. Treasury Department’s fanatical pursuit of money-laundering, which has sidelined urgent diplomatic dialogue with North Korea, Russia, Iran, Syria and dozens of developing nations, while sheltering the most blatant violator of international financial rules, Israel.
Otto and the Warmbier family are victims not of the North Koreans but of American officialdom, which failed to intervene on his behalf and, if the unpleasant truth be told, wanted him silenced.
The salient points in the Warmbier case, discussed below, include:
– his education at University of Virginia (UVA, Charlottesville) and the London School of Economics (LSE, UK) which accounted for his expertise in econometrics, or mathematical methods for measuring and assessing trends in commerce, trade financing, investment and the general economy, which are the measuring tools in economic intelligence;
– his recruitment and visit to Israel, despite a Christian family background, sponsored by Hillel International, the Zionist college organization funded by the Bronfman-Seagram’s fortune, which financed the formation of the modern Jewish State of Israel;
– Warmbier’s intelligence-related travels to Cuba and North Korea, which are implacable foes of Israel, and to Ireland, where an increasing majority of Irish voters support Palestinian statehood;
– a neoconservative agenda implemented at the highest levels of the U.S. Treasury Department, which aggressively sabotaged the many attempts by the State Department’s East Asian desk to resume the 6-party non-nuclear talks with Pyongyang and establish Track II (partial) diplomatic status between the United States and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK); and
– his ambition to achieve fame from the North Korean caper to gain admission to the Z secret society at UVA, a key to gaining a high-ranked position in one of US intelligence agencies involved in economic analysis or with the Department of Commerce.
An old folk saying goes: “Ambition is a good servant but a bad master.” Otto Warmbier allowed his personal ambitions to put himself in service Jews with money, that is, Israeli interests filtered through U.S. Treasury Department. In bondage to Mammon, the aspiring economist conducted covert research in Ireland, Cuba and North Korea to identify vulnerabilities in their relatively small economies.
Nothing succeeds like enforced impoverishment to convince hostile governments to yield to the geopolitical demands of the Israelis and their Zionist minions, including the Treasury, IMF and World Bank.
Perils of Propaganda
As in the case of the fabricated and slanted “Russia Dossier” against Donald Trump’s presidential campaign team, the Warmbier case is linked with anti-Kremlin British and the pro-Israeli lobby in London and Washington D.C., which oppose normalization of U.S. relations with Russia and North Korea and instead support sanctions aimed at regime change.
Warmbier, by attending an exchange program at the London School of Economics (LSE), was following in the footsteps of a controversial DPRK tour of 10 LSE students, who were duped into accompanying a producer with the BBC Panorama program and his Japanese wife, who organized and led the tour. During that North Korean visit, Panorama reporter Sweeney posed as a professor from LSE.
In July 2014, following a critical review of ethical misconduct in the fraudulent DPRK visit, the BBC board fired Sweeney and all reporters with Panorama. Sweeney* is notoriously pro-Israeli aggression and an opponent of the Palestinian rights.
(*Sweeney later produced “Trump: The Kremlin Candidate?” with anti-Putin journalist Andrei Soldatov, releasing the documentary four days before the Inauguration.)
Here’s an excerpt from the Guardian:
“The dispute (with the London School of Economics) is over whether the BBC had given the 10 students on the Pyongyang trip enough information about the risks of traveling with undercover journalists. . . . The students said they were told in London that a journalist would accompany them and that they risked deportation or detention if they were rumbled. In Beijing, before they flew to Pyongyang, they were informed that John Sweeney was the journalist and that he worked for the BBC, they said. They were also joined by Sweeney’s wife, Tomiko Newson (who organized the trip) and a BBC cameraman.”
By no coincidence, then, Warmbier was also guided by British operatives onto a tour of North Korea. On a winter holiday stopover in Beijing en route to Hong Kong, he was introduced to Xian-based Young Pioneers Tours by a mysterious 40-year-old Briton named Danny Gratton, who claims to be a sales manager from Stone, England. (The small town’s robust social media page contains zero mention of anyone with the surname Gratton.) Warmbier’s roommate in Beijing and North Korea, and last man to see Warmbier, Gratton was never contacted subsequently by the State Department or Young Pioneers Tours, which is operated by British citizen Gareth Johnson.
Brain Damage Before Arrival in Pyongyang
A significant fact, unreported in all media except The Washington Post, Warmbier had reportedly complained to the Pioneers’ British tour guide Charlotte Gutridge of suffering a severe headache at Beijing Airport and wanted to cancel his participation in the tour.
His brain damage likely originated long before his flight to Pyongyang. At UVA, he had been on the Greco-Roman wrestling team and may have suffering the long-term effects of a concussion incurred during a fight. (Also, the captain of his wrestling team committed suicide.)
The medical diagnosis from the University of Cincinnati Medical Center on his return to the USA indicated Warmbier suffered severe loss of brain tissue. This could mean that he had contracted a brain-wasting disease resembling spongiform encephalopathy, aka Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD, or mad cow disease), which is usually transmitted by blood infusions.
On New Year’s Day and the night of January 1 in Pyongyang, other tour members reported that Warmbier had been drinking vodka until 5 a.m. His fraternity Theta Chi has repeatedly been cited for encouraging and sometimes forcing excessive drinking.
Joining Mission Implausible
Another fact that demands mention is that the price of a tour to North Korea from Beijing exceeds 2,000 U.S. dollars. Warmier was planning to join an overseas study program in Hong Kong (an expensive city), and his family is reportedly not wealthy. Where then did he get the money to join the Young Pioneers Tour?
As in the case of the LSE students recruited for a BBC Panorama documentary hostile to Pyongyang, Warmbier was probably lured by Israeli intelligence and British handlers with a well-paid offer to conduct economic espionage inside the DPRK. Whether his actual espionage assignment was to hack the domestic North Korean financial networks will probably never be revealed by any of the involved intel agencies. If he was given a smartphone loaded with malware to capture the encrypted codes of wifi networks or ATM cash dispensers will be kept classified.
Instead of completing his covert assignment and rising up the ranks of the U.S. Treasury, Otto Warmbier ended his short life as a patsy, another “victim” to be used for propaganda purposes against North Korea by the Zionist lobby in Washington D.C.
Israel Agents inside the US Treasury Department
At the time of his supposedly impulsive decision to join a British-operated China-based tour to North Korea at the end of December 2016, the U.S. Treasury Department and the British Exchequer-Bank of England was zealously focusing their money-laundering campaign against North Korea.
(Note: The collaboration of the USA and UK in global financial domination is rooted in the postwar Bretton Woods system, under which nation-states were forced to report and later cede their gold reserves, and eventually surrender to a paper currency global regime based on the floating value of the U.S. dollar. The financial tyranny of Bretton Woods, which enshrined the unrepresentative Federal Reserve and major European central banks represented the most devastating loss of national sovereignty and defeat for democracy ever in world history.)
The anti-DPRK point-man at Treasury was Adam Jacob Szubin, the director of the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), whose powers stem from the Patriot Act and the 2008 Wall Street bailout bill. Previously, in the wake of 911, he was positioned by the Pentagon neoconservatives (who were neck-deep in the WTC attack) as senior adviser to the Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, the catbird’s seat for the then-coming assault against Arab and other Muslim states and Islamic banking. Raised in an Orthodox Jewish family, Szubin received his childhood education at the Yavnev Academy in Dallas, the Ramaz School in Manhattan, and went on to Harvard Law, the bailiwick of Zionist propagandist Professor Alan Dershowitz.
Several Treasury bureaus, especially the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) under the supervision of Jennifer Shasky Calvery, a hard-nosed prosecutor and former women’s basketball player were equally devoted to the Zionist project to enforce sweeping trade sanctions on Pyongyang and cut off every foreign banking relationship with North Korea, especially in the Chinese-speaking realm (Macau, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and PR China). The Zionist financial Inquisition culminated in the Foreign Account Compliance Act (FATCA), a bureaucratic exercise in legalism and accounting as egregious as the tea tax of King George III, which essentially deprived millions of American citizens, residents and even foreigners who have resided in the USA for only two years of their business accounts with non-US banks.
Global financial persecution was given the White House blessing from Jason Furman, the Obama-appointed Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), which provides policy direction and confidential research to the CIA and NSA. The anti-DPRK crusade culminated in the virtual elimination of North Korea’s banking and finance sector from the worldwide SWIFT interbank fund transfer system.
The links of the Hillel Foundation for Campus Life to anti-DPRK initiatives was cemented by the group’s President and CEO, Eric Fingerhut, who is the former Congressman from Cincinnati and Wyoming, Ohio, hometown of the Warmbiers. Fingerhut was a lead author of House Resolution 1407, which opposed the international boycott of Israel, “To prohibit government-to-government and commercial arms sales to any country that is participating in or cooperating with the boycott of Israel by Arab countries.” That includes North Korea and Cuba, countries Warmbier happened to visit.
The full-court press by the Treasury cabal failed to crush North Korean economy, which has emerged stronger due to the country’s national program of economic self-reliance and lack of sovereign debt to the IMF and World Bank. The endless stream of deceit and intrigue have only made countries like Iran, Syria and North Korea more determined to combat the menace of Zionist domination. The courage of these small nations against guilt-tripping and threats of annihilation should encourage Americans, Europeans, Russians, Chinese and Japanese to break with the arrogant Zionist regime and its Wall Street brethren and instead support the basic rights of the rightful owners of the Holy Land, the Palestinian people.
Yoichi Shimatsu, Senior Advisor and Contributing Editor for The 4th Media, is an independent Hong Kong-based investigative journalist and documentary producer.
The 4th Media