Freed Bobby Fischer flies to Iceland

[KiwiCoromandel]

Sporting a long beard, chess legend Bobby Fischer walked free yesterday from a Japanese detention centre and immediately headed to the airport to fly to his new home, Iceland, following a nine-month stand-off with Tokyo officials trying to deport him to the United States.

Before leaving, however, the eccentric genius offered a few parting shots to the leaders of Japan and the United States, whom he accused of "kidnapping".

"I won't be free until I get out of Japan," he told a crowd of reporters at the airport before boarding his flight to Copenhagen en route to Reykjavik.

"This was not an arrest. It was a kidnapping cooked up by Bush and Koizumi," he said, referring to US President George Bush and Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi.

"They are war criminals and should be hanged," he said.

Fischer, with a long white beard and wearing jeans and a baseball cap, left the immigration detention centre on Tokyo's outskirts early Thursday morning. Japanese officials released the eccentric chess icon after taking him into custody in July, when he tried to leave the country using an invalid US passport.

Fischer, 62, was accompanied to the airport by his fiancee, Miyoko Watai - the head of Japan's chess association - and Iceland's ambassador to Japan Thordur Oskarsson.

He was in high spirits and characteristically defiant as he arrived at the airport.

As Fischer walked toward the airport entrance, he turned, unzipped his pants and acted like he was going to urinate on the wall. He called Japan's ruling party "gangsters" and said he was being hounded by the United States because it is "Jew-controlled".

Read more.......

http://smh.com.au/news/World/Freed-Bobby-F...1525304087.html

[Kooperman]

Defiant chess champ Fischer lands in Iceland

After 9 months’ detention in Japan, he says he feels ‘great’

The Associated Press

Updated: 6:25 p.m. ET March 24, 2005REYJKAVIK, Iceland -

Chess legend Bobby Fischer arrived in Iceland on Thursday, hoping to avoid deportation to the United States by accepting an offer of citizenship from a country still grateful for its role as the site of his most famous match.

Fischer said earlier in Denmark that freedom felt “great” after nine months’ detention in Japan, where he had been held for trying to leave the country using an invalid U.S. passport.

Fischer was released from Japanese custody earlier in the day and stopped over in Denmark before boarding a private plane for Iceland, which has granted him citizenship.

Upon arriving in Reykjavik, Fischer was to stay at the Hotel Loftleider — the same place where he stayed in 1972 when he defeated Russian Boris Spassky in the Cold War chess showdown that propelled him to international stardom.

“The same suite is waiting for him,” Einar Einarsson, chairman of an Icelandic Bobby Fischer supporters’ group preparing a welcome in Reykjavik, told The Associated Press.

Iceland’s Channel 2 television reportedly arranged for a private jet to fly Fischer to Reykjavik from an airport outside Malmo, Sweden, which is linked to Copenhagen by a bridge and tunnel. Einarsson said Fischer wanted to avoid the airport at Keflavik, which is near a U.S. Army base.

Fischer, 62, is wanted by the United States for violating sanctions imposed on the former Yugoslavia by playing an exhibition match against Spassky in 1992.

Chess player defiant

He was detained by Japanese officials in July for using an invalid passport. Fischer claims his U.S. passport was revoked illegally, and sued to block a deportation order to the United States.

Iceland’s Parliament stepped in this week to break the standoff by giving Fischer citizenship. Fischer is not in the clear, however, because Iceland, like Japan, has an extradition treaty with the United States.

On the flight from Tokyo to Copenhagen, Fischer accused Japanese officials of “kidnapping” him by taking him into custody, calling his detention “totally illegal.”

“This was a kidnapping because the charges that the Japanese charged me with are totally nonsense,” he told Associated Press Television News.

“My passport was perfectly good,” he insisted, sipping liqueur in the first-class cabin.

Asked what it will be like to be free, he replied: “Great, great.”

More anti-Semitic remarks

Fischer was defiant when he arrived with his fiancee, Miyoko Watai, at the Tokyo airport after being released. As he walked toward the airport entrance, he turned, unzipped his pants and acted as if he was going to urinate on the wall. He called Japan’s ruling party “gangsters.”

Fischer, whose mother was Jewish, also said he was being hounded by the United States because it is “Jew-controlled.”

Fischer also took a few shots at President Bush and Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi.

“This was not an arrest. It was a kidnapping cooked up by Bush and Koizumi,” he told reporters.

“They are war criminals and should be hung,” he said in an apparent criticism of the U.S.-led war in Iraq.

“Koizumi is mentally ill in my opinion,” he said, calling him a “stooge.”

Iceland cites 'humanitarian grounds'

Iceland’s ambassador to Japan, Thordur Oskarsson, said before Fischer’s release that Washington sent a “message of disappointment” to his government over giving Fischer citizenship.

“Despite the message, the decision was put through Parliament on humanitarian grounds,” said Oskarsson, who accompanied Fischer on the flight to Europe.

A federal grand jury in Washington, meanwhile, reportedly is investigating possible money-laundering charges involving Fischer, and he may face tax-related charges as well. Fischer was reported to have received $3.5 million from the competition in the former Yugoslavia, and boasted then that he didn’t intend to pay any income tax on the money.

In Washington on Tuesday, the State Department said it had officially asked Japan to hand over Fischer.

“Mr. Fischer is a fugitive from justice. There is a federal warrant for his arrest,” said deputy spokesman Adam Ereli.

Tokyo initially refused Fischer’s request to go to Iceland, saying Japanese law only allowed his deportation to the country of his origin. But following Iceland’s decision Monday, Japanese Justice Minister Chieko Nono said officials would consider letting Fischer go there.

Fischer became a chess icon when he dethroned Spassky in Iceland, claiming the first U.S. world chess championship in more than a century.

He gave up the title a few years later to another Soviet, Anatoly Karpov, by refusing to defend it. He then fell into obscurity before resurfacing to play the 1992 exhibition rematch against Spassky.

Fischer won the rematch. But his playing violated U.S. sanctions imposed to punish then-President Slobodan Milosevic. If convicted, Fischer — who hasn’t been to the United States since then — could face 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Though generally a recluse, Fischer has emerged from silence in radio broadcasts and on his Web page to express anti-Semitic views and rail against the United States.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7266699/

[Shawn]

I'd say the charges against him are trumped up. And... he's a bit of a dickwad.

[Kooperman]

I'd say the charges against him are trumped up. And... he's a bit of a dickwad.

To merely call Fischer a dickwad does a grave disservice to genuine everyday dickwads.....

[Redneck4sure]

He spent 9 months in jail and I doubt he would have gotten more if he had been convicted. I hope he never comes back because that would save the money it cost for a trial and possibly imprisonment.

[DudeAsInCool]

The guy is nuts. But he sure knows how to play chess - check out his book: its all about endings...

[Redneck4sure]

The guys is nuts.

The guy is nuts?? How many personalities are you counting?

You have been living in the poor side of town too long. It seems English is a second language.

[DudeAsInCool]

The guy is nuts?? How many personalities are you counting?

You have been living in the poor side of town too long. It seems English is a second language.

You must mean Icelandic is a second language? Is that the language you're speaking?

[Redneck4sure]

post editin' sombitch.

[DudeAsInCool]

post editin' sombitch.

[DudeAsInCool]

A recent book on the guy:

The Biggest Game

A review by Adrienne Miller

Bobby Fischer's 1972 chess match in Reykjavik, Iceland against

world champion Boris Spassky is as iconic and intrigue-filled

as Ali's fight in Zaire. It's also the game that, for better or

worse, turned chess (unaccountably) into somewhat of a fad of

its era. David Edmonds and John Eidinow, the authors of the gripping

Wittgenstein's Poker, a book about the brief and much-contested

argument between the philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl

Popper (the "poker" in question wasn't the game, but an actual

fire poker) clearly relish the deliciously nasty, deceit- and

manipulation-filled story. Fischer was an impossible case, and

very famously so: "In the media," the authors write, "Fischer

was routinely described with a range of derogatory adjectives.

He was insolent, arrogant, rude, uncouth, spoiled, self-centered,

abusive, offensive, vain, greedy, vulgar, disrespectful, boastful,

cocky, bigoted, fanatical, cruel, paranoid, obsessive ?." (You

get the idea.) Spassky, however, has been analyzed much less.

The War Against Bobby Fischer presents a richer Soviet perspective

than has been offered before, and it's a page-turner for grandmasters

and neophytes alike. ...

Read the entire review at:

http://www.powells.com/esq/review/2004_03_03

[slum_goddess]

y'know, if he thinks bush is a war criminal, he can't be too damn crazy...just a thought.

[method77]

I read a big article about him and Kasparov and I found many things that they said reasonable. Many of their views were crazy though