North Korea has surrendered 55 cases holding what is believed to be the remains of American troops killed during the Korean War.
President Donald Trump hailed the transfer as a “great moment for so many families,” but news analyst Charlie Sennott said on Boston Public Radio today that the moment is in line with the president’s efforts to garner himself positive press — what he called “the showmanship of Trump.”
“The issue of foreign fighters who fought for this country, who are away ... he knows he’s going right into that base that really wants to see [their return] happen,” said Sennott. "There's just a theatrics to the thing that I think is something Trump intuitively understands."
Sennott cautioned against the early celebration, saying the process of identifying the remains has barely begun.
“We’ve got a lot of work to do to find out what are those remains,” said Sennott. “There’s one set of dog tags, and the rest of it, we have no idea.”
Sennott said that work will take months. Each case was opened and photographed in North Korea, and a more in-depth review will happen at Osan Air Base.
“We won’t know for months, and so [Trump] grabs the headlines, gets the benefit and then we’re left with scientists who will be spending painstaking hours to try to really do something that is so humane and necessary, which is to let those families know what really happened to their loved ones when they served our country,” said Sennott.
Charlie Sennott is a news analyst at WGBH, where he also heads up the GroundTruth Project.
