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Autistic Pentagon Hacker faces Extradition to US.
By The Anglo American | October 11, 2009
Gary McKinnon
Gary McKinnon will not be allowed to appeal against his extradition to the United States. McKinnon, 41, finds himself a victim of imbalanced law between the United States and the UK.
President Bush and the, then Prime Minster, Tony Blair agreed a mutual extradition treaty to allow speedy trial of terrorists. While Blair could easily force through such legislation, and did so, he overlooked that it was not in the President’s powers to deliver his side of the agreement.
Senate oversight, a quality missing in the British parliament, saw the extradition of American citizens as a very bad idea. Surely, they argued, Americans are allowed protection under the law - their law. The Unites States has never ratified the treaty.
British lawmakers simply did not consider the argument or the hurdles that President Bush would have in passing such a law. As a result British citizens do not have the same protections under British law - that protects them from a foreign power.
In the middle of this legal quagmire is Gary McKinnon. McKinnon is a sufferer of Asperger’s Syndrome. And like many autistic people he sees the world through a different prism. The consequences for his search for information about UFO’s on a US military computer were beyond him.
The American Government rightly takes hacking very seriously. Their aim is simple. By bringing McKinnon to justice they hope to make an example of him to discourage others. If convicted, Mckinnon faces up to 60 years in a US jail.
The United States Ambassador to Britain, Louis Susman, put it this way.
“Let’s turn the tables around. What if a young man in the US had shut down many of the most secure computers in the UK? I think there would be some sentiment here that this was not in the UK’s best interests.”
Except this analogy does not stand up to scrutiny. US courts have failed, over decades, to extradite IRA terrorists, and a host of other criminals who have often entered the US illegally. No American hacker in robust good health is going to see his day in a British courtroom let alone one who is ill.
America defends it citizens and rightly so. It also believes that non-citizens are entitled to protection under its laws.
The fault lies with the failure of the British government to do the same for its people.
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