(UPDATED BELOW.)

(UPDATED AGAIN.)

Hi all,

My apologies for the downtime over the past 12 hours and now a backdated chris-floyd.com.

But I awoke this morning in Holland to find that the database for chris-floyd.com was completely wiped and our technicians don't have a clue how it happened.

It was simply gone.

The most recent backup I have is back to the 4th of December so I hope you will all be patient as Chris places the articles back in one by one (sorry Chris).

Lesson learnt is a daily db backup is imperative, and that's now happening. So this won't happen again.

Once again, My Sincerest Apologies

Richard Kastelein
Web Guy for Chris

UPDATE from Chris: Just wanted to voice my thanks to Rich and the server guys for all the yeoman service on restoring the site, which appears, upon preliminary investigation, to have been hacked, although that's not definite yet. Thanks again for your patience.

UPDATE II: The restored pieces will be running below this post for the time being. I want to leave this one on top for awhile to explain what's been going on.

"The frequent US bombing of civilian Iraqi cities that are already under US military occupation has been one of the most under-reported stories of the Iraq War."

It has indeed. It is virtually an un-reported story in the mainstream press. This savage air campaign (a flagrant war crime, by the way; but of course in these days of "continuity," no one cares about that) was a key component of what Barack Obama has called the "success beyond our wildest dreams" of Bush's "surge" – along with the U.S. death squad operations that Establishment court scribe Bob Woodward was allowed to reveal earlier this year. Meanwhile, that "wild success" – which engendered a sense of "triumphalism" among Bush's entourage on the trip to Baghdad, the NY Times reports – has produced such a peaceful, stable situation that Bush had to sneak into Iraq's capital city (having sneaked out of America's capital city), where he was humiliated before the entire world…. more than five full years after he proclaimed "Mission accomplished." (If this is the type of "wild success" Obama envisions for his own promised Bush-like surge in Afghanistan, then the prez-elect better prepare himself for a taste of shoe leather on one of his future visits to Kabul, as one of our commenters here astutely noted yesterday.)

As for Zaidi, AbuKhalil asks another pertinent question: "Will those fancy Western journalistic associations now demand that he be released? Will they speak on his own behalf? Or will they now say that shoe throwing is a brand of terrorism and that the man should be shipped to Guantanamo?" No points for guessing the answer to that one.

AbuKhalil also notes that Zaidi is a leftist, although he will doubtless be portrayed as a typical "Muslim extremist" in the corporate press. Or rather, they will say nothing at all about his background and motivation, leaving their well-trained readers and viewers to assume that he is one of them dark and dastardly Islamofascist devils.

But he is not. Whatever else Zaidi may or may not be, in his action on Sunday he was simply a human being driven beyond all endurance by the sight of the man who was directly responsible for the scenes of carnage, suffering and despair that Zaidi has witnessed among his own people, year after year after year. He has also experienced it directly, having been kidnapped by unnamed forces in 2007 and beaten for two days while they questioned him about his journalistic work – the same kind of treatment he is doubtless receiving at the moment from the "sovereign" government of "liberated" Iraq.

It may be that the wide acclaim his insult of Bush has drawn across Iraq – where demonstrations for his release were held today – will protect Zaidi from the worst depredations of Bush's proxy torturers. We can only hope so – just as we hope that there will be many more who will follow his courageous example in the years to come, whenever and wherever Bush ventures out on a public platform.

UPDATE: The New York Times has some vox pop from around Iraq on local reactions to Zaidi's action. Although the corporate press in the West is still downplaying the incident, the symbolic significance of the gesture will be highly resonant around the world: an image of defiance on a par with the lone protestor standing before the tanks at Tiananmen Square.

UPDATE II (Dec. 23): The high-profile of Zaidi's action may have saved him from immediate execution, but he has apparently been tortured while in the custody of Iraq's liberated democratic strongman sectarian government, as MSNBC reports (via Angry Arab):

The Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at President George W. Bush says he would do it again and that he was forced to write a letter of apology after being tortured in jail, the journalist's brother claimed Monday....

The journalist's brother, Uday al-Zeidi, told The Associated Press that the letter was written against the journalist's will.

"He told me that he has no regret because of what he did and that he would do it again," Uday al-Zeidi said by telephone.

He said he visited his brother in jail on Sunday and found him with a missing tooth and cigarette burns on his ears. Muntadhar al-Zeidi told his brother that jailers also doused the journalist with cold water while he was naked, Uday al-Zeidi said....  

"When I saw him yesterday, there were bruises on his face and body. He told me that they used an iron bar to hit him when they took him out of the press conference room. He told me that he began screaming and thought all those at the press conference would have heard his voice," he told AP Television News.

But you know what? Good American Liberals  will tell you that Zaidi should be punished severely for his heinous crime. As Bernard Chazelle reports at A Tiny Revolution:

Donald Johnson linked to this comment by Rick Perlstein:

Liberals should not make light of or license the physical assault on the leader of a sovereign state, no matter how much he's deservedly hated. This is not how we do politics, unless we're in favor something tending toward anarchy, or fascism.

This seems open and shut to me: the Iraqi journalist should go to jail for a rather long time.

Whenever a liberal "of impeccable credentials" shouts "long prison sentence!" I reach for my deconstruction toolkit. First, a rhetorical question: Should Marylin Klinghoffer, of Achille Lauro fame, have gone to jail for a rather long time after she spat in the faces of the terrorists who murdered her husband? After all, no one wants to make light of or license the physical assault on any man, no matter how much he's deservedly hated. This is not how we do justice, unless we're in favor of something tending toward anarchy, or fascism....

Perlstein speaks from the gut. His insistence on a long prison sentence is visceral. He feels violated by a bit of lese majeste, a touch of desacralization, and a pinch of blasphemy. The sentiment behind it is reflexive deference to authority. Many Americans just can't shake their royalist instincts. I see it in the classroom and on campus every day. I see it in sidewalk demos -- my working definition of a royal subject is someone who demonstrates against the war on the sidewalk but takes over the whole fucking street for the Annual fire department parade. I see it in the blind worship for the military. I see it every four years when the bloke-in-chief moves into his new quarters and it's Lady Diana getting married all over again (or buried again, depending on your political affiliation). The horses, the cannons, the flybys, the pageantry, the gravitas of Tom Brokaw. When you've been brainwashed with that sort of crap all your life, it's awfully tough throwing your Rockports at Dear Leader.

(This is a slightly updated version of a post originally published on Dec. 16.) 

The "Good War" in Afghanistan – the Bush-launched war that Barack Obama tells us we must fight and win – continues to deteriorate before our eyes. Just like every other operation in the so-called "War on Terror" (another Bush-launched campaign that Obama has fully embraced as his own), the Afghan war, now in its seventh year, has proven entirely counter-productive to its stated aims. Instead of stabilizing a volatile region and denying it as a base for violent extremism, it has of course done the opposite. The shock waves of the heavy-handed American-led invasion of Afghanistan – a country that no foreign power has ever conquered and held – have spread across Central Asia, most dangerously into Pakistan.

Afghanistan itself is in a desperate condition, laden with a weak, foreign-installed government dominated by warlords and riddled with corruption. The illegal opium trade, quashed by the Taliban, has now surged to historic levels, and is flooding the streets of Europe and the West with cut-rate heroin – not to mention fuelling an astonishing rise in drug addiction among Afghans, Pakistanis and Iranians. At every turn, the iron hand of American militarism is producing more suffering, more chaos, more corruption, more extremism, more slaughter, both directly and as blowback from people maddened into wanton violence by the relentless stream of atrocities.

And no, to comprehend an origin of violence is not to condone it; but reality compels acknowledgement of the fact that state-terror atrocity breeds "asymmetrical" atrocity in turn. It also teaches by example. The state militarists of empire say: Violence works. Violence is honorable. Violence is the most effective way to accomplish your goals. And you must not blench at killing innocent people in your violent operations. Is it any wonder that others adopt these methods, which are championed and celebrated by our most respected and legitimatized elites? Recall the words of one of America's own home-grown "asymmetricals," Timothy McVeigh, who at his sentencing for the Oklahoma City bombing quoted Justice Louis Brandeis: "Our Government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example."

McVeigh of course was schooled in death and violence as a soldier in the first Iraq War, where he had been appalled to find himself killing people who wished America no harm, and to see the wholesale slaughter of innocent people in a conflict that need never have been fought. A peaceful settlement of the complex financial and territorial dispute between Iraq and Kuwait had been brokered by the Arab League; but although Iraq accepted the deal, at the last minute, the Kuwaiti royals – long-time business partners of then-President George H.W. Bush – reneged and declared, "We will call in the Americans." Then the regional squabble between Iran and Kuwait was deceitfully turned into a "global threat" by the false claim that Iraq's invading forces were massing on the borders of Saudi Arabia. Pentagon chief Dick Cheney claimed secret satellite imagery showed vast Iraqi armies preparing to swoop down on the Saudi oilfields, the lifeline of the American economy. Bush Family capo James Baker, then Secretary of State, went before Congress and declared that the imminent war was all about saving American jobs. But commercial imagery obtained by a US newspaper at the time showed there were no Iraqi forces on the Saudi border. It was all a knowing lie – as were the claims paraded before Congress that Iraqi soldiers were flinging infants from their incubators in Kuwaiti hospitals. This bearing of false witness had been arranged by a prominent Bush-connected PR firm. The first Iraq War was just as falsely based and pointless as the second.

Unfortunately for the innocents in Oklahoma City, McVeigh too fully absorbed the lessons of the omnipresent teacher, even as he came to reject the teacher's authority. But his greatest crime in the imperial system was not that he killed innocent people in furtherance of political aims, but that he did it free-lance, without the "legitimacy" of a militarist government which slaughters innocent people by the hundreds of thousands in furtherance of its political aims.

Now in Afghanistan, the atrocities of the "legitimate" forces are fueling a prodigious growth in the "illegitimate" insurgency, transforming thousands of people who once opposed the Taliban into fighters under its banner. (Of course, "Taliban" has become a generic term for an array of opponents to the Western presence in Afghanistan). But these atrocities are an inevitable by-product of the very presence of foreign armies, which require "force protection" and close air cover and missile strikes to maintain and protect their operations. This inevitably produces large amounts of "collateral damage" (i.e., dead, maimed, ruined and dispossessed civilians.) The larger the foreign force, the more "force protection" it needs, which produces more atrocities, which fuels more resistance and more extremism. This is virtually a mathematical law. But of course, the very essence of a militarist state is that is feels unbounded by any law – not even the laws of human nature. Thus Washington is now increasing its military presence in Afghanistan, with Obama promising even more.

What will be the results of this policy? Do the math.

II.
The Guardian provides an illuminating look at the fruits of American policy in Afghanistan today. This is what Barack Obama wants to see more of:

It was 7.30 on a hot July morning when the plane came swooping low over the remote ravine. Below, a bridal party was making its way to the groom's village in an area called Kamala, in the eastern province of Nangarhar, to prepare for the celebrations later that day.

The first bomb hit a large group of children who had run on ahead of the main procession. It killed most of them instantly.

A few minutes later, the plane returned and dropped another bomb, right in the centre of the group. This time the victims were almost all women. Somehow the bride and two girls survived but as they scrambled down the hillside, desperately trying to get away from the plane, a third bomb caught them. Hajj Khan was one of four elderly men escorting the bride's party that day.

 "We were walking, I was holding my grandson's hand, then there was a loud noise and everything went white. When I opened my eyes, everybody was screaming. I was lying metres from where I had been, I was still holding my grandson's hand but the rest of him was gone. I looked around and saw pieces of bodies everywhere. I couldn't make out which part was which."

Relatives from the groom's village said it was impossible to identify the remains. They buried the 47 victims in 28 graves.

Stories like this are relatively common in today's Afghanistan. More than 600 civilians have died in Nato and US air strikes this year. The number of innocents killed this way has almost doubled from last year, and tripled from the year before that. These attacks are weakening support for the Afghan government and turning more and more people against the foreign occupation of the country...

The latest figures from the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, taken a month ago, suggest about 750 civilians have been killed by foreign forces this year. Most were killed in air strikes. The remainder were shot by jumpy soldiers, who often open fire in crowded public places after an attack on one of their convoys.

Humanitarian aid agencies say privately that they believe the figure is significantly higher, as many victims classed as "insurgents" are actually non-combatants...

Nato and US spokesmen say their forces go to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties. But all too often after an air strike, they deny civilians are among the dead or claim far fewer were killed.

A recent Human Rights Watch report said US investigations, when launched, have been "unilateral, ponderous, and lacking in transparency, undercutting rather than improving relations with local populations and the Afghan government".

The routine denials and hands-off attitude are contributing to a growing sense among Afghans that their lives are cheap in the eyes of the foreigners.

"We know they don't intend to kill the civilians but we don't believe they care enough not to," said Ahmad Zia, a jeweller in Kabul's busy bazaar. "If it continues we will see a lot more people joining the fight against the foreigners. It's inevitable."...

Sharif Hassanyar, a former interpreter with US Special Forces who is now working as a journalist, described how decisions were taken to bomb areas based on flimsy intelligence.

"I remember when I was working with a group of Rangers and a spy in the area told them the Taliban were training in a garden of a house so they bombed the house, without checking the information. Afterwards they found out that there had not been any Taliban there, only civilians were killed by the bombs," he said.

Informants for the foreign forces often give bad information either accidentally or because they are pursuing tribal or personal vendettas against individuals in neighbouring villages, he added...

It is not just the deaths from air strikes that are poisoning the hearts of Afghans. In the capital, Kabul, each day, terrified drivers swerve out of the way as foreign troops hurtle through the streets in their armoured convoys training their rifles on the drivers and pedestrians and shouting obscenities: "Stay the fuck back!"

The Afghans know to keep out of the way. Last year a US military convoy ploughed into several vehicles, killing seven people including a family. The incident sparked a riot involving thousands of angry Kabul residents. It was suppressed only after the security forces started shooting protesters on the streets. At least 15 people were killed.
"The anti-American feelings in Afghanistan are not just coming from conservative or religious elements," said Shukria Barakzai, a female MP.

"These feelings stem from the actions and military operations of the foreign troops. The anti-western sentiment is directly because of the military actions, the civilian casualties, and the lack of respect by foreign troops for Afghan culture."

(A restored version of a post originally published on Dec. 21.)

1. Justice is for Suckers
Dick Cheney's recent admission on national television that he approved the waterboarding of a Terror War captive is, of course, the most prominent salvo in an on-going campaign to secure presidential pardons for the war criminals of the Bush Regime before the War Criminal-in-Chief leaves office next month. As many others have noted, Cheney's declaration that he -- and by implication, everyone else at the top level of government -- approved a torture technique that is a flagrant violation of United States law is aimed at making it impossible for George W. Bush not to issue pardons for his minions who set up and maintained the literally murderous gulag constructed, with his own full knowledge and approval, during his term in office.

So here's a prediction: at some point shortly before he waddles off the national stage, Bush will issue a weasle-worded blanket pardon for all those involved in his torture and murder program. This will be presented as a measure to protect those "on the front lines of the War on Terror" -- the interrogators of the military and the various security agencies -- from "politically motivated prosecutions." But its true aim will be to absolve those responsible for this Hitlerian-Stalinist war crime: Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Gonzales, Feith, Yoo, and many others, including, of course, the jabbering putz in the Oval Office himself.

This pardon will provoke about as much controversy as Bush's father's pardons of the Iran-Contra criminals just before he left office as a disgraced and despised failure in 1992. Those pardons had the effect of crippling the investigation of a terrorist-enabling scam that was about to implicate Bush himself. This investigation -- and others -- were later killed off completely by Bush I's successor, Bill Clinton, who -- strangely enough -- is now regarded by the elder Bushes as a sort of unofficial son. [See  "A Tale of  Two Houses: How the Bushes and Clintons Took Us to Hell."]

That is to say, Bush II's upcoming pardon of himself and his accomplices will be a one-day story -- two days at the very most -- before it is buried by feverish folderol about the Obama nomination ... and by Obama himself, who will doubtless issue some sort of statement expressing the need for the nation to "move on" from such matters of ancient history in light of the tough challenges ahead, etc., etc.

And if in the unlikely event that Bush does not issue such pardons, it can only mean one thing: he has already received assurances that the principals behind this evil and shameful system will not be prosecuted.

2. School for Scandal
How can it be that such abominable and flagrant (not to mention counterproductive and ineffective) crimes -- crimes which have provoked the deaths of thousands of Americans -- will not be prosecuted by the United States government? A new biography of one of the CIA's founding fathers and guiding lights, James Jesus Angleton, gives us a clue. A review of the book in Lobster, the always-interesting UK-based journal of "deep politics," provides the following quote.  Referring to Angleton's education at Yale and Harvard (George W. Bush's two alma maters), author Michael Holzman notes:

Angleton was educated by men paid to educate men of his class to believe -- and to behave as if by second nature -- that protecting the interests of that class was identical with patriotism.

(This was originally posted on Dec. 19.) 

In a brief post yesterday, I wrote (This was originally posted on Dec. 19.) that African-Americans were treated as second-class citizens in the United States. I would now like to apologize for making such a controversial -- and flagrantly incorrect -- statement. Obviously, I was letting my knee-jerk liberal PC prejudices run wild. For as a new article in The Nation forcefully demonstrates, African-Americans are not treated as second-class citizens in the United States; they are treated as wild animals to be hunted down and shot in cold blood.

The article is a very detailed investigation of the white vigilante groups that formed, with police approval, in the white enclave of Algiers Point in New Orleans in the days after Hurrican Katrina. Although authorities had designated the area -- which had largely escaped damage in the storm and flood -- as a vital evacuation point for those trapped in the city, a group of white residents seized the opportunity to declare open season on anyone with black skin. Many African-Americans were shot and several were killed; but no one knows the exact number, because New Orleans police have refused to investigate any of the incidents, and coroner's records of the gun-blasted bodies that showed up in the area have unaccountably gone missing.

Many of the shooters have been quite open -- even boastful -- of their activities, and of their certainty that they will never be prosecuted. As the Nation's A.C. Thompson reports:

[Militia member Wayne Janak is] equally blunt in Welcome to New Orleans, an hourlong documentary produced by the Danish video team, who captured Janak, beer in hand, gloating about hunting humans. Surrounded by a crowd of sunburned white Algiers Point locals at a barbeque held not long after the hurricane, he smiles and tells the camera, "It was great! It was like pheasant season in South Dakota. If it moved, you shot it." A native of Chicago, Janak also boasts of becoming a true Southerner, saying, "I am no longer a Yankee. I earned my wings." A white woman standing next to him adds, "He understands the N-word now." In this neighborhood, she continues, "we take care of our own."

...Some of the gunmen prowling Algiers Point were out to wage a race war, says one woman whose uncle and two cousins joined the cause. A former New Orleanian, this source spoke to me anonymously because she fears her relatives could be prosecuted for their crimes. "My uncle was very excited that it was a free-for-all--white against black--that he could participate in," says the woman. "For him, the opportunity to hunt black people was a joy."

"They didn't want any of the 'ghetto niggers' coming over" from the east side of the river, she says, adding that her relatives viewed African-Americans who wandered into Algiers Point as "fair game." One of her cousins, a young man in his 20s, sent an e-mail to her and several other family members describing his adventures with the militia. He had attached a photo in which he posed next to an African-American man who'd been fatally shot. The tone of the e-mail, she says, was "gleeful -- her cousin was happy that "they were shooting niggers."

(This is a restored version of a post that originally ran on Dec. 17.)

With this resolution, the entire world – the entire world – has turned its back on the people of Somalia. They have been abandoned as utterly, completely – and officially -- as any people in history.

The UN Security Council voted unanimously Tuesday to authorize nations to conduct military raids, on land and by air, against pirates plying the waters off the Somalia coast... The U.S.-drafted resolution authorizes nations to "use all necessary measures that are appropriate in Somalia" in pursuit of pirates, as long as they are approved by the country's transitional federal government.

Aid groups, meanwhile, said the approval of military raids could worsen the situation on the ground. "Expanding anti-piracy operations inside Somalia risks further complicating the conflict and could exacerbate an already dire humanitarian crisis," said Nicole Widdersheim, who heads Oxfam International's New York office. She urged nations to focus on reducing violence within the country, rather than "the threat to commercial interests from piracy off the Somali coast."

The commander of the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet warned last week that ground attacks on suspected Somali pirates would put the lives of innocent civilians at risk.

Rice told reporters Tuesday, "What we do or do not do in cases of hot pursuit we'll have to see, and you'll have to take it case by case."

And now the Bush Regime -- going out in a Götterdämmerung of blood and fury aimed at the world (and at the American people) -- wants to intensify the chaos in Somalia, laying it bare to more invasions, "precision strikes," death squad operations, renditions and other atrocities, this time coming from not just from Washington and its Terror War proxies but from all directions. This is the answer of the American militarist state to any problem, such as piracy or terrorism: the blunderbuss assault of massive military force by land, sea and air; vast destruction, social collapse -- and immeasurable, unbounded human suffering.

This is the reality of much-praised "continuity" in "national security affairs" that Barack Obama's appointments have promised. This is what will be "continued."

[This a slightly updated version of an earlier post that was wiped out in a database crash.]

At last, years late -- but better late than never, I suppose -- we have official recognition by the United States Senate of a fact that has been well-known to anyone willing to even glance at reality in past decade. We refer of course to the newly released report by the Senate Armed Services Committee, in which a bipartisan panel led by Carl Levin and John McCain states quite plainly that the top officials of the Bush Administration created and maintained a systematic program of torture against the prisoners captured (or kidnapped or renditioned or simply rounded up swoopstake in mass raids) in the Terror War.

The report, based on 18 months of investigation, lays out the process by which the White House and Pentagon instigated torture, perverted the laws to justify torture and spread torture throughout the world. The Washington Post reports:

In the most comprehensive critique by Congress of the military's interrogation practices, the Senate Armed Services Committee issued a report yesterday that accuses [Donald] Rumsfeld and his deputies of being the authors and chief promoters of harsh interrogation policies that disgraced the nation and undermined U.S. security. The report...contends that Pentagon officials later tried to create a false impression that the policies were unrelated to acts of detainee abuse committed by members of the military.

"The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of 'a few bad apples' acting on their own," the report states. "The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees."

The report is the most direct refutation to date of the administration's rationale for using aggressive interrogation tactics -- that inflicting humiliation and pain on detainees was legal and effective, and helped protect the country. The 25-member panel, without one dissent among the 12 Republican members, declared the opposite to be true.

The administration's policies and the resulting controversies, the panel concluded, "damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority."

According to the report, the torture ball started rolling with the president and his Feb. 7, 2002, memorandum stating that the Geneva Conventions didn't apply to al-Qaida or the Taliban. The CIA and the Department of Defense began scurrying to establish their brutal interrogation regimes, while the White House and top Bush administration officials brushed aside legal hurdles and approved specific, horrifying techniques.

In the spring of 2002, for example, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice asked then-CIA Director George Tenet to brief members of the National Security Council on the harsh interrogation program under development by the CIA, a program that has utilized waterboarding. Meetings ensued. "Members of the president's cabinet and other senior officials attended meetings at the White House where specific interrogation techniques were discussed," the report states. Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was there.

Rice also asked former Attorney General John Ashcroft to provide his stamp of approval, and he did. On Aug. 1, 2002, Ashcroft's Office of Legal Counsel issued legal memos after input from former White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and former counsel to the Vice President David Addington. The memos used semantics to make abuse fair game, defining torture as only that pain "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death."

By then, the CIA was already off and running with its new authority, spiriting prisoners off the streets of Pakistan and into its network of secret prisons, or "black sites," for interrogation. On Dec. 2, 2002, Rumsfeld joined the party, issuing a memo authorizing the use of tough techniques for detainees in military custody at Guantánamo, including stress positions, forced nudity, use of dogs and sensory deprivation. Legal memos from all three military branches had previously warned that the tactics might be illegal, but the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers, put the kibosh on any further study.

But if I were Rumsfeld and Bush, I'd avoid a lot of travel abroad from now on. Some zealous prosecutor might have them arrested, as happened to  "Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who was charged in Spain and arrested in Britain (though he was released to Chile, he had been in danger of being extradited to Spain).