| Rodman's NK trip 

If you ever bother to read about any of these accounts, they are all practically cookie-cutter. NK visits are practically on rails. It's not definitive proof of anything, but neither is the lack of visits to NK producing 'smoking gun' photos from prison camps.

  | Based on that logic, the U.S. is 10x worse with
  | 2.2 million people in prison right now.

1. The US doesn't throw entire families in jail to punish the actions of a single person.

2. Your logic about the numbers doesn't take into account the portion of the population. The US is a lot larger than North Korea. If we translate those numbers into percentages, North Korea has 0.81% of the population in prison, and the U.S. has 0.69% of the population in prison.

3. As bad as the US prison system is, I don't think that it's reach GULAG / Auschwitz levels, which by all accounts NK has.

  | Their human rights record leaves much to be
  | desired. But so does the human rights record
  | of every country on earth, including the US.

That's like saying that GW Bush started a war in Iraq. Hitler started a war in Europe. They both started wars, therefore GW Bush == Hitler! My logic wins!

[ Note: Nobody wanted to believe that the Holocaust was real in Germany until the troops started liberating the camps. IIRC, there were rumors, but most people basically said what you are saying, though there was probably more out of disbelief that human beings could do such a thing. ]