Yesterday, Gary McKinnon lost his latest legal battle to fight his extradition order to the United States. McKinnon is charged with hacking 97 US government computers. McKinnon and family claim that he was looking for evidence of alien life, and that due to suffering from Asperger Syndrome, he was not able to understand that what he was doing was profoundly wrong.
McKinnon has until September to launch a final appeal against extradition to the United States, else find himself on a plane handcuffed to US Law Enforcement officials. McKinnon's mother appealed to President Barack Obama to halt the extradition proceedings.
Okay, here is The Atlantic Hopper's take on this!
1. Convenient - McKinnon was "diagnosed" with Asperger AFTER it was revealed on National news that he was facing extradition, not that I am saying that the Asperger diagnosis is phony, because it may well be genuine. It just all seems a bit convenient to me.
2. UK has no jurisdiction - McKinnon and his supporters claim that he should face trial here in the UK, well not really, we don't have any jurisdiction to prosecute for a crime committed against a foreign government. Yes, we are allies and we have an extradition treaty. The facts of the case should be decided by an AMERICAN jury in a FEDERAL court. This was a crime against the Federal Government of the United States and should be treated as such. Locality of the perpetrator of the crime is irrelevant in this type of case.
3. Obama has more important things to worry about - I am not saying that McKinnon is a master criminal but is clearly a very intelligent man, despite his alleged disabilities, Obama has a tough legislative agenda on his plate, and should not be wading in willy-nilly on this, unless he decides to give McKinnon a Presidential Pardon.
4. If you don't want to go to a nasty American Jail - DON'T HACK THE PENTAGON!
This is not an expert legal opinion, it is just the opinion of a lowly blogger, but like GottaLaff from The Political Carnival would say "But what do I know?"
This clown is lucky he didn’t try this crap during the last administration. He could have been the target of Cheney’s black operations team.
ReplyDeleteTrue!
ReplyDelete