Boris Johnson in the Telegraph on Gary Mckinnon

Illuminati Killer Robots reveals:: Boris Johnson writes in the Telegraph http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/borisjohnson/5963698/Stop-passing-the-buck-on-Gary-McKinnon-and-let-British-common-sense-prevail.html Since it is now obvious that the British state is about to commit one of the most protoplasmic acts of self-abasement since Suez, and since the clock is now ticking to the moment when Gary McKinnon, 43, will be taken from his home in north London and put – if necessary by force – on a plane to America, it is time to pose the question everyone seems to have ignored. Leave aside, for a moment, the morality of exporting the Asperger’s sufferer for trial in America. Can I ask, what is the point of having a trial at all? I simply do not understand what proposition is to be so expensively tested in this American courtroom. Gary McKinnon is accused of hacking into American military computers. He is charged with roaming around the cyberspace of the Pentagon, and leaving such insulting spoor as “your security is cr-p”. He is accused of guessing passwords, and trying to view secret photos of unidentified flying objects in Nasa databanks. All this will be put to him in court by some brace-twanging prosecution counsel, as though it were the crux of the matter. And yet Mr McKinnon has never denied it. He has always said that he hacked into American military computers, and that is because he earnestly believes that there is a conspiracy between Uncle Sam and Big Oil to cover up the interception of alien craft that are running on some kind of renewable energy. For all I know he may be right. It might just be that the Vulcans have discovered some way of making cucumbers from moonbeams, and then boiling those cucumbers up into bioethanol. It may be that he is right in thinking that alien life forms did land at Roswell. It may be that the securocrats of the Pentagon have for decades been concealing the fact that Elvis is alive and well, and living on Mars. If the trial were to get to the bottom of that or any other big UFO mystery, then it might be worth the admission. But, of course, the trial turns on no such question. The only point to be proven is whether or not Gary McKinnon did the hacking, and on that there is no doubt. He says he did. He says it freely. So the only questions remaining are: whether his actions constitute a crime that deserves the seven-year torture of the extradition process, whether he deserves the possibility of a 60-year jail sentence, and whether the British authorities are right to be engaged in this dog-like grovelling to America. To all those questions the answer must be an emphatic no. I do not believe for a moment that the Pentagon and Nasa sustained half a million pounds’ worth of damage to their systems, as they bleatingly allege. But even if it were true, Gary McKinnon has performed a service that must be rated cheap at the price. He may be a crank, but then he is certainly no terrorist. He may believe in little green men, but he was not operating as a fifth columnist on behalf of these Venusians. He was not trying to cripple American defences in preparation for an assault from outer space. He was simply following up a weird intuition that UFOs exist, with all the compulsiveness that he has exhibited since he was a child. In so doing, he has generously helped America to prepare against attack from a more sinister foe. If it was so ludicrously easy to penetrate these encryptions, then what could al-Qaeda have done? Just imagine if America’s defence establishment had commissioned IT consultants to probe their systems as exhaustively as Gary McKinnon. The contract would have been worth far more than £500,000. McKinnon did it without charge, sitting up all the night, hardly eating, smoking heavily and spending so long tap-tapping in his dressing gown that his girlfriend gave up on him. The Americans shouldn’t be threatening him with jail. They should be offering him consultancy. Even if you still believe – and I don’t – that there was some element of malice in his actions, that does not make him a fit person to be sent for trial and incarceration in America. The diagnosis of Asperger’s has been confirmed by the world’s leading expert in the field, Simon Baron-Cohen. He says that if this dreamer were to find himself in prison, there is a risk that he would take his own life. This 2003 extradition treaty – supposedly aimed at al-Qaeda – has caught the wrong man in its gin. My objection is not that the treaty is lopsided, though of course it is. The crucial point is that Gary McKinnon is not some smooth-talking banker accused of fraud, nor is he a terrorist. He is a classic British nutjob, who passionately believes something that is irrational but cannot be easily controverted, and he is a prime candidate for the protection of the Government. In a tortuous apologia for his decision to extradite, the Home Secretary yesterday wrote – as if it were a good thing – that “one of the most important features of the 2003 Act was the deliberate removal of any discretion the Home Secretary may have in relation to extradition”. On this account, we may wonder why we have elected politicians at all. On this account, the treaty is like a kind of computer-assisted catapult that pings people across the Atlantic whenever the Americans require. In reality, the Home Office has no such excuse. It could easily have decided, on humanitarian grounds, that the extradition should not go ahead. The High Court has merely confirmed that its decision to ignore common sense and decency was not, in itself, illegal. It was just immoral. I can identify at least one mysterious flying object over the skies of London, and that is the buck being passed, at high speed, by the Home Secretary. Not since the waters retired from the face of the earth has there been such a display of blob-like invertebracy in Whitehall. Let us hope that a British court will have the courage in the next few days to stop this madness, shame the Government, and prevent the martyrdom of a harmless eccentric.