Gary McKinnon believes in little green men \u2013 but it doesn't make him a terrorist <\/h1>\nAmericans who want a harmless hacker extradited from Britain must be from a different planet, says Boris Johnson. <\/h2>\n<\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n\nBy Boris Johnson
Last Updated: 7:31PM GMT 26 Jan 2009
Comments 1<\/a><\/span> | Comment on this article<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n\n![\"Gary](\"http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/telegraph\/multimedia\/archive\/01247\/gary-mckinnon_1247262c.jpg\")
<\/p>\nGary McKinnon is no terrorist<\/span> Photo: PA<\/span> <\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nWay
\nto go, Mr President. I think we can all agree that it has been a
\ncracking first week. Apart from the swearing-in glitch \u2013 which was
\nentirely the fault of that judge \u2013 I have supported just about
\neverything that Barack Obama has done.
I liked the speech, and the
\npromise that America is ready to lead again. It is good news that he is
\ngetting rid of Guantanamo and water-boarding and extraordinary
\nrendition, all the dread apparatus of the Bush regime.
But before
\nwe all get too misty-eyed about the new era, and before Barack devotes
\nhimself entirely to the meltdown of the banks, there is one more thing
\nin his diplomatic in-tray. There is one last piece of neocon lunacy
\nthat needs to be addressed, and Mr Obama could sort it out at the
\nstroke of a pen.
In a legal nightmare that has lasted seven years,
\nand cost untold millions to taxpayers both here and in America, the US
\nJustice Department is persisting in its demented quest to extradite
\n43-year-old Londoner, Gary McKinnon.
To listen to the ravings of
\nthe US military, you would think that Mr McKinnon is a threat to
\nnational security on a par with Osama bin Laden. According to the
\nAmericans, this mild-mannered computer programmer has done more damage
\nto their war-fighting capabilities than all the orange-pyjama-clad
\nsuspects of Guantanamo combined.
And how? He is a hacker. He
\nhacked into the Pentagon, he hacked into the army, the navy, and the
\nair force, and the Americans say he temporarily paralysed US Naval
\nWeapons station Earle, by deleting some files.
In their continuing
\nrage at this electronic l\u00e8se-majest\u00e9, the Americans want us to send him
\nover there to face trial, and the possibility of a 70-year jail
\nsentence. It is a comment on American bullying and British
\nspinelessness that this farce is continuing, because Gary McKinnon is
\nnot and never has been any kind of threat to American security. He had
\nonly one reason for fossicking around in the databanks of Pentagon
\ncomputers, and it had nothing to do with the war on terror or indeed
\nthe military capabilities of any country on earth.
Mr McKinnon
\nbelieves in UFOs, and he is one of the large number of people who think
\nthat there is a gigantic conspiracy to conceal their existence from the
\nrest of us, and that this conspiracy is organised by the US government.
\n
I am not so brave as to claim that UFOs do not exist. The
\nAstronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees, has said he believes in life forms
\non other planets, and no decent empiricist could rule out the
\npossibility.
It may be that the former footballer and BBC
\npresenter David Icke is right, and that the world is run by giant
\nlizards in disguise. Perhaps Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling are
\nthemselves supersized saurians who have been sent on a 10-year mission
\nto wreck the UK economy, in preparation for the great lizard takeover.
\nMaybe the whole plot will climax in Davos this week, when all 2,500
\nleading economic and political lizards will meet in the Swiss alps \u2013
\nhaving done untold damage to global finances \u2013 and hail the arrival of
\nthe lizard mother ship as it perches on the mountain top.
All this
\nis certainly theoretically possible, just as it is possible that there
\nreally was an accident involving an alien spacecraft at Roswell, and
\nthat there really is an extra large teapot in orbit around Mars. It is
\njust that I happen to think it vanishingly unlikely, and we have a word
\nfor people who persist in believing in alien abduction. They are
\ncranks, and they do not deserve to be persecuted. They do not deserve
\nto be arrested, and have their lives ruined by the agonising delays of
\nthe law, unable to work, a drain on the resources of the state and of
\ntheir families.
Gary McKinnon wasn't even a proper hacker. He did
\nsomething called "blank password scanning", and because these military
\ncomputers were so dumb as to lack proper passwords, he was able to roam
\naround their intestines in search of evidence of little green men. He
\nwas so innocent and un-furtive in his investigations that he left his
\nown email address, and messages such as "Your security is crap". And
\nyes, since you ask, he does think that he found evidence that the US
\nmilitary is infiltrated by beings from the planet Tharg. He even knows
\nthe names and ranks of various non-terrestrial officers, though
\nunfortunately they have been deleted from his hard drive.
It is
\nbrutal, mad and wrong even to consider sending this man to America for
\ntrial. He has been diagnosed as having Asperger's syndrome, for
\nheaven's sake. How can the British government be so protoplasmic, so
\npathetic, so heedless of the well-being of its own people, as to sign
\nthe warrant for his extradition? What kind of priorities do we have
\nthese days? We treat a harmless UFO-believer as an international
\nterrorist, and are willing to send him to prison in America, and as for
\nreal terrorists \u2013 people who bombed and maimed innocent civilians in
\nthis country \u2013 we seem willing to give their families \u00a312,000 each, on
\nthe grounds that they are all "victims" of the troubles in Northern
\nIreland.
The British government is obviously too feeble to help Mr
\nMcKinnon, and even though the courts last week granted him another
\nreview, it is plain that the matter will simply drag preposterously and
\nexpensively on.
It is time for Barack Obama to show the new
\nleadership the world has been crying out for. It is time for the
\nCommander-in-Chief to tell the US military to stop being so utterly
\nwet, dry their eyes, and invest in some passwords that are slightly
\nmore difficult to crack.
In the words of the spiritual with which
\nhe began his inauguration ceremony, it is time for the new President to
\nlet our people go. To persist with this extradition is so cruel and so
\nirrational that the only plausible explanation is that beneath their
\nsuits the US Justice Department and the UK Home Office are occupied by
\na conspiracy of great green gibbering geckos from outer space. <\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1073","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/omniversity.us\/exopolitics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1073","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/omniversity.us\/exopolitics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/omniversity.us\/exopolitics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omniversity.us\/exopolitics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1073"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/omniversity.us\/exopolitics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1073\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/omniversity.us\/exopolitics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omniversity.us\/exopolitics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omniversity.us\/exopolitics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Last Updated: 7:31PM GMT 26 Jan 2009
Comments 1<\/a><\/span> | Comment on this article<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n
<\/p>\nWay
\nto go, Mr President. I think we can all agree that it has been a
\ncracking first week. Apart from the swearing-in glitch \u2013 which was
\nentirely the fault of that judge \u2013 I have supported just about
\neverything that Barack Obama has done.
I liked the speech, and the
\npromise that America is ready to lead again. It is good news that he is
\ngetting rid of Guantanamo and water-boarding and extraordinary
\nrendition, all the dread apparatus of the Bush regime.
But before
\nwe all get too misty-eyed about the new era, and before Barack devotes
\nhimself entirely to the meltdown of the banks, there is one more thing
\nin his diplomatic in-tray. There is one last piece of neocon lunacy
\nthat needs to be addressed, and Mr Obama could sort it out at the
\nstroke of a pen.
In a legal nightmare that has lasted seven years,
\nand cost untold millions to taxpayers both here and in America, the US
\nJustice Department is persisting in its demented quest to extradite
\n43-year-old Londoner, Gary McKinnon.
To listen to the ravings of
\nthe US military, you would think that Mr McKinnon is a threat to
\nnational security on a par with Osama bin Laden. According to the
\nAmericans, this mild-mannered computer programmer has done more damage
\nto their war-fighting capabilities than all the orange-pyjama-clad
\nsuspects of Guantanamo combined.
And how? He is a hacker. He
\nhacked into the Pentagon, he hacked into the army, the navy, and the
\nair force, and the Americans say he temporarily paralysed US Naval
\nWeapons station Earle, by deleting some files.
In their continuing
\nrage at this electronic l\u00e8se-majest\u00e9, the Americans want us to send him
\nover there to face trial, and the possibility of a 70-year jail
\nsentence. It is a comment on American bullying and British
\nspinelessness that this farce is continuing, because Gary McKinnon is
\nnot and never has been any kind of threat to American security. He had
\nonly one reason for fossicking around in the databanks of Pentagon
\ncomputers, and it had nothing to do with the war on terror or indeed
\nthe military capabilities of any country on earth.
Mr McKinnon
\nbelieves in UFOs, and he is one of the large number of people who think
\nthat there is a gigantic conspiracy to conceal their existence from the
\nrest of us, and that this conspiracy is organised by the US government.
\n
I am not so brave as to claim that UFOs do not exist. The
\nAstronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees, has said he believes in life forms
\non other planets, and no decent empiricist could rule out the
\npossibility.
It may be that the former footballer and BBC
\npresenter David Icke is right, and that the world is run by giant
\nlizards in disguise. Perhaps Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling are
\nthemselves supersized saurians who have been sent on a 10-year mission
\nto wreck the UK economy, in preparation for the great lizard takeover.
\nMaybe the whole plot will climax in Davos this week, when all 2,500
\nleading economic and political lizards will meet in the Swiss alps \u2013
\nhaving done untold damage to global finances \u2013 and hail the arrival of
\nthe lizard mother ship as it perches on the mountain top.
All this
\nis certainly theoretically possible, just as it is possible that there
\nreally was an accident involving an alien spacecraft at Roswell, and
\nthat there really is an extra large teapot in orbit around Mars. It is
\njust that I happen to think it vanishingly unlikely, and we have a word
\nfor people who persist in believing in alien abduction. They are
\ncranks, and they do not deserve to be persecuted. They do not deserve
\nto be arrested, and have their lives ruined by the agonising delays of
\nthe law, unable to work, a drain on the resources of the state and of
\ntheir families.
Gary McKinnon wasn't even a proper hacker. He did
\nsomething called "blank password scanning", and because these military
\ncomputers were so dumb as to lack proper passwords, he was able to roam
\naround their intestines in search of evidence of little green men. He
\nwas so innocent and un-furtive in his investigations that he left his
\nown email address, and messages such as "Your security is crap". And
\nyes, since you ask, he does think that he found evidence that the US
\nmilitary is infiltrated by beings from the planet Tharg. He even knows
\nthe names and ranks of various non-terrestrial officers, though
\nunfortunately they have been deleted from his hard drive.
It is
\nbrutal, mad and wrong even to consider sending this man to America for
\ntrial. He has been diagnosed as having Asperger's syndrome, for
\nheaven's sake. How can the British government be so protoplasmic, so
\npathetic, so heedless of the well-being of its own people, as to sign
\nthe warrant for his extradition? What kind of priorities do we have
\nthese days? We treat a harmless UFO-believer as an international
\nterrorist, and are willing to send him to prison in America, and as for
\nreal terrorists \u2013 people who bombed and maimed innocent civilians in
\nthis country \u2013 we seem willing to give their families \u00a312,000 each, on
\nthe grounds that they are all "victims" of the troubles in Northern
\nIreland.
The British government is obviously too feeble to help Mr
\nMcKinnon, and even though the courts last week granted him another
\nreview, it is plain that the matter will simply drag preposterously and
\nexpensively on.
It is time for Barack Obama to show the new
\nleadership the world has been crying out for. It is time for the
\nCommander-in-Chief to tell the US military to stop being so utterly
\nwet, dry their eyes, and invest in some passwords that are slightly
\nmore difficult to crack.
In the words of the spiritual with which
\nhe began his inauguration ceremony, it is time for the new President to
\nlet our people go. To persist with this extradition is so cruel and so
\nirrational that the only plausible explanation is that beneath their
\nsuits the US Justice Department and the UK Home Office are occupied by
\na conspiracy of great green gibbering geckos from outer space. <\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1073","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/omniversity.us\/exopolitics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1073","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/omniversity.us\/exopolitics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/omniversity.us\/exopolitics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omniversity.us\/exopolitics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1073"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/omniversity.us\/exopolitics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1073\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/omniversity.us\/exopolitics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omniversity.us\/exopolitics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omniversity.us\/exopolitics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}