Gary McKinnon is no terrorist Photo: PA

Way
to go, Mr President. I think we can all agree that it has been a
cracking first week. Apart from the swearing-in glitch – which was
entirely the fault of that judge – I have supported just about
everything that Barack Obama has done.
I liked the speech, and the
promise that America is ready to lead again. It is good news that he is
getting rid of Guantanamo and water-boarding and extraordinary
rendition, all the dread apparatus of the Bush regime.
But before
we all get too misty-eyed about the new era, and before Barack devotes
himself entirely to the meltdown of the banks, there is one more thing
in his diplomatic in-tray. There is one last piece of neocon lunacy
that needs to be addressed, and Mr Obama could sort it out at the
stroke of a pen.
In a legal nightmare that has lasted seven years,
and cost untold millions to taxpayers both here and in America, the US
Justice Department is persisting in its demented quest to extradite
43-year-old Londoner, Gary McKinnon.
To listen to the ravings of
the US military, you would think that Mr McKinnon is a threat to
national security on a par with Osama bin Laden. According to the
Americans, this mild-mannered computer programmer has done more damage
to their war-fighting capabilities than all the orange-pyjama-clad
suspects of Guantanamo combined.
And how? He is a hacker. He
hacked into the Pentagon, he hacked into the army, the navy, and the
air force, and the Americans say he temporarily paralysed US Naval
Weapons station Earle, by deleting some files.
In their continuing
rage at this electronic lèse-majesté, the Americans want us to send him
over there to face trial, and the possibility of a 70-year jail
sentence. It is a comment on American bullying and British
spinelessness that this farce is continuing, because Gary McKinnon is
not and never has been any kind of threat to American security. He had
only one reason for fossicking around in the databanks of Pentagon
computers, and it had nothing to do with the war on terror or indeed
the military capabilities of any country on earth.
Mr McKinnon
believes in UFOs, and he is one of the large number of people who think
that there is a gigantic conspiracy to conceal their existence from the
rest of us, and that this conspiracy is organised by the US government.

I am not so brave as to claim that UFOs do not exist. The
Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees, has said he believes in life forms
on other planets, and no decent empiricist could rule out the
possibility.
It may be that the former footballer and BBC
presenter David Icke is right, and that the world is run by giant
lizards in disguise. Perhaps Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling are
themselves supersized saurians who have been sent on a 10-year mission
to wreck the UK economy, in preparation for the great lizard takeover.
Maybe the whole plot will climax in Davos this week, when all 2,500
leading economic and political lizards will meet in the Swiss alps –
having done untold damage to global finances – and hail the arrival of
the lizard mother ship as it perches on the mountain top.
All this
is certainly theoretically possible, just as it is possible that there
really was an accident involving an alien spacecraft at Roswell, and
that there really is an extra large teapot in orbit around Mars. It is
just that I happen to think it vanishingly unlikely, and we have a word
for people who persist in believing in alien abduction. They are
cranks, and they do not deserve to be persecuted. They do not deserve
to be arrested, and have their lives ruined by the agonising delays of
the law, unable to work, a drain on the resources of the state and of
their families.
Gary McKinnon wasn't even a proper hacker. He did
something called "blank password scanning", and because these military
computers were so dumb as to lack proper passwords, he was able to roam
around their intestines in search of evidence of little green men. He
was so innocent and un-furtive in his investigations that he left his
own email address, and messages such as "Your security is crap". And
yes, since you ask, he does think that he found evidence that the US
military is infiltrated by beings from the planet Tharg. He even knows
the names and ranks of various non-terrestrial officers, though
unfortunately they have been deleted from his hard drive.
It is
brutal, mad and wrong even to consider sending this man to America for
trial. He has been diagnosed as having Asperger's syndrome, for
heaven's sake. How can the British government be so protoplasmic, so
pathetic, so heedless of the well-being of its own people, as to sign
the warrant for his extradition? What kind of priorities do we have
these days? We treat a harmless UFO-believer as an international
terrorist, and are willing to send him to prison in America, and as for
real terrorists – people who bombed and maimed innocent civilians in
this country – we seem willing to give their families £12,000 each, on
the grounds that they are all "victims" of the troubles in Northern
Ireland.
The British government is obviously too feeble to help Mr
McKinnon, and even though the courts last week granted him another
review, it is plain that the matter will simply drag preposterously and
expensively on.
It is time for Barack Obama to show the new
leadership the world has been crying out for. It is time for the
Commander-in-Chief to tell the US military to stop being so utterly
wet, dry their eyes, and invest in some passwords that are slightly
more difficult to crack.
In the words of the spiritual with which
he began his inauguration ceremony, it is time for the new President to
let our people go. To persist with this extradition is so cruel and so
irrational that the only plausible explanation is that beneath their
suits the US Justice Department and the UK Home Office are occupied by
a conspiracy of great green gibbering geckos from outer space.