Why is Bobby Fischer in custody now? Politics.

[BurtWorm]

From "Bobby Fischer's strangest endgame"

"Arguably the greatest chess player of all time (and one of the weirdest human beings) is detained in Japan, wanted by the U.S. Will he escape an ignominious fool's mate?"

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Rene Chun


<Day pass or subscription required>

http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2004/07/24/hunting/print.html

Consider this action-adventure blurb of a lead, pulled from a Fischer story in last Saturday's Los Angeles Times: "For 12 years he has stayed one move ahead of the U.S. government he despises, always in motion, hard to corner. But U.S. justice may have finally caught up with Bobby Fischer."

"Hard to corner?" Fischer has his own Web site. Fans send him e-mail. He has appeared on 21 live radio interviews in the past five years. Even his private cellphone number has been listed on the Internet. A fifth-grader with a rudimentary knowledge of Google could track down America's notorious grandmaster fugitive in 50 keystrokes or less.

...

Russell Targ, a physicist in Palo Alto, Calif., who was married to Fischer's late sister, Joan, ... maintains that his famous brother-in-law's latest legal plight is merely a smokescreen orchestrated by the Bush administration to distract from growing foreign and domestic problems. "What Bobby's accused of is playing chess 12 years ago in Yugoslavia," he says bitterly. "It's just a distraction from 900 dead American soldiers in Iraq and the floundering economy. They can't find bin Laden, so they got Bobby."

...

A more likely explanation is that Bobby is being proffered as a bargaining chip by Japan so that it can hold onto its very own celebrity American expatriate, a 64-year-old U.S. Army sergeant named Charles Jenkins. The North Carolina native allegedly fled to North Korea while patrolling the demilitarized zone between North and South in 1965 (Jenkins claims he was abducted). Then, after spending almost four decades as Kim Jong Il's prized mantelpiece trophy, Jenkins finally arrived in Tokyo this week, just several days after Japanese immigration officials nabbed Fischer. The timing of these two pending extradition cases is enough to give pause to even the most somnambulant Fox News viewer....

[MikeG]

1. When does he go to Room 101?