This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Saturday, June 24th, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The North Korean Hermit Kingdom has improved somewhat, at least for elites in the country, and yet many things have stayed the same as

evidenced by the death of a comatose student who had been sentenced to decades of

hard labor.

Edo Senior fellow Doug Bandau recently returned from Pyongyang.

We spoke yesterday.

You were in Pyongyang when Otto Warmbier, and I'm sure I'm getting the name wrong, was released.

He was already in a coma.

We found out after he was released.

Was there any sense of that in Pyongyang at the time?

No, I found out about his release via the internet actually, which foreigners can access

while they're in Pyongyang.

I'd planned on mentioning to the people I talked to that it did not do their image any good by holding him.

And it's tragic the situation that he came out of.

I asked them if this was their offering in a sense to the Trump administration to try to get

say talks going and they were vehement that this was humanitarian and had no

political purpose.

And we may be able to take them on their word for that because I doubt that the medical facilities

in Pyongyang were equipped to deal with someone who was in a coma?

Well, they certainly would have a good hospital for the leadership.

Their problem is what I suspect they figured out was that if he was declining to have him die there would be an extraordinary

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