What a disaster for the Obama administration! From CNN:

He said Thursday that he felt that his life and that of his wife would be in danger if he were to remain in the country.

“Anything could happen,” he said.

Chen said he left the embassy only after U.S. officials encouraged him to do so.

“The embassy kept lobbying me to leave and promised tohave people stay with me at the hospital,” he said. “But this afternoon, as soon as I checked into the hospital room, I noticed they were all gone.”

He said he was “very disappointed” in the U.S. government and felt “a little” that he had been lied to by the embassy.

This could be deadly for poor Chen Guangcheng, but it’s unequivocally humiliating for America. What the hell happened here? Throwing a blind man whose only crime was speaking out against forced abortions back to those wolves?

On the other hand, US officials insist that they never forced Chen out of the embassy, that they asked him over and over if he was sure he wanted to do this. More:

The American ambassador, Gary Locke, reiterated Thursday that Mr. Chen had not been coerced into leaving the embassy on Wednesday and insisted that the dissident lawyer had left of his free will after a plan had been worked out with the Chinese government that he and his family could relocate to a city close to Beijing where he would pursue his law studies.

If this is true, and Chen, upon release, realized he had made a terrible mistake, it is only human to blame the Americans for allegedly misleading him. My sympathies are naturally with Chen, but we should allow for the possibility that it was he who erred here, not our people. In any case, what a rotten bunch of bastards the Chinese government is. Funny how it’s the world’s rising power, rich and filled with opportunity, yet nobody wants to live there, unless they have a foreign passport and can leave when the thugocracy comes after them.