An Army private who fled to North Korea before being returned home to the United States last month has been detained by the U.S. military, two officials said Thursday night, and is facing charges including desertion and possessing sexual images of a child.
The charging document does not provide significant detail on any of the allegations, though it does accuse King of knowingly possessing a video of a child engaging in sexual conduct last July 10 and says that he solicited a user of Snapchat, a social media platform, to produce images of underage sexual activity.
Sean Timmons, an attorney who specializes in military law at the Tully Rinckey law firm and who reviewed the charging document, said all the transactions that occurred on Snapchat were not secure or private and were accessible by the government.
“He probably reasonably believed his illegal conduct would have no evidentiary trail, but Snapchat actually saves everything,” Timmons said.
Source: Associated Press (Archive link to full article: https://web.archive.org/web/20231020055507/https://apnews.com/article/north-korea-travis-king-army-14794185ea3dfc197a86ba376b1626ea)
Um that’s a bit of a stretch.
I mean I wouldn’t say it’s impossible and if I were an amoral person in charge of CIA/State Dept and trying to discredit people it is an obvious thing to reach for, but there’s no real history of them regularly, routinely lobbing accusations like this around. Nor is it necessary in this case.
I further don’t suppose it’s necessary to invent something provable like this to tar and feather this guy. He doesn’t need to be torn down and turned into a monster because no one cared to begin with, he’s a nobody. He’ll disappear just as fast forever. If he was a somebody, like that famous footballer who went to Iraq and had credibility, followers, possibility of future platforms it might make sense to need to character assassinate in such a way as to pre-emptively silence them and make everyone turn their backs in disgust and disregard them. But he’s not. He’s a nobody. He can easily be dismissed as mentally unwell, as crazed, as whatever they want and no one is going to look much into it. Him saying he was treated well in the DPRK would receive no audience or just be used as further evidence of DPRK propaganda and conniving and/or his own bad mental state.
People won’t find it a reach to think he acted irrationally with a flight or fight response when faced with prison and think nothing more of the situation, it won’t change minds on the DPRK.
I’ll admit the fact he’s low ranking, probably not from money and black probably means a harsher reaction than if he’d been from a wealthy family, an officer, white (they probably would have swept it under the rug, goodness knows the US military is full of monsters, predators, etc as they’re constantly catching them in stings outside military bases and that’s when their special forces aren’t being caught running child sex rings on-base). But that doesn’t mean it’s not very fucked up and criminal.