Tuesday, February 03, 2009

Gary McKinnon, Cause Célèbre

Forget Mumia Abu Jamal, a new age needs a new celebrity martyr. And in this alien-haunted age, UFO hacker Gary McKinnon has become the hot new cause among the British cogniscenti. Part of it may certainly be the lingering chafe marks among the Brits from eight years of neocon bullying, but it feels like there's a subtle whisper of a paradigm shift underneath all of the shouting. 


Read this, from The Guardian:

Court one in the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand was packed. Standing room only...the occasion was the hearing earlier this month to decide whether computer hacker Gary McKinnon, who faces extradition to the US for hacking into Pentagon and Nasa computers...

No less a luminary than Boris Johnson (the Mayor of London) has taken up the cause. From his Telegraph column:

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.

Maybe change is in the air. What kind of change is still an open question. 

Maybe this kind of change: "UFOs crash Obama’s party and open door for ‘X-Files’ disclosure."