Hugo Rifkind
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Across the East China Sea, meanwhile, a Japanese chap by the name of Koichi Wakata has just returned from the International Space Station. ‘I haven’t talked about my underwear to crew members,’ he shared, upon landing. ‘I have been wearing it for about a month.’ A couple of weeks in, he ate a curry.
Score one, I’d say, to the Japanese. For ever since man first thought of wedging a goldfish bowl over his ears, there have been two competing visions of how life in space ought to be. Some look up, and essentially see a dentist’s surgery. Others see an abattoir. Clean, sterile perfection versus grit, blood and dirt.
On the one side, along with the Chinese, we would find a thousand bits of dated sci-fi in which everybody wears tin foil and only the villains have beards. This would include most of Star Wars, Buck Rogers, Doctor Who, Lost in Space, most of Star Trek, and the persistent pop-culture notion that aliens are small antiseptic creatures with fantastic skin (albeit green) and no genitals.
On the other side, we’d have Alien, the good bits of Star Wars (when Vader’s helmet comes off), the good bits of Star Trek (when the slug goes into Mr Zulu’s ear), Barbarella, ET, Sunshine, and the persistent pop-culture notion that even though aliens are small antiseptic creatures with fantastic skin, all they will ever want to do is strap us on to a trolley and bugger us to death with a giant metal probe.
Fictionwise, the latter wins every time. This is most starkly seen in the difference between the old Battlestar Galactica (a bit rubbish — the Cylons are shiny robots who go whummm) and the new Battlestar Galactica (utterly fantastic — the Cylons are spongy organic clones grown in vats of slime, who have tired of going whummm and now waft around in skimpy frocks instead). Factwise, too, you need your muck to stay interested. Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff is a remarkably boring book considering its subject matter (how America got into space), but it comes alive when it gets on to toilet habits. What was it really like to be an early astronaut? Wolfe tells us about Alan Shepard, the first American in space, who spent four hours strapped upside-down in his ship before what was supposed to be a 15-minute flight, and ended up tripping a fuse on his life-support monitors by doing a wee in his spacesuit.
On the International Space Station three weeks ago the toilet broke down. Koichi Wakata will have been fine, what with his magic pants, but the rest of the 13-strong crew had to queue to use the Russian one. That’s the stuff. Space travel is not about men being machines. It’s about man and machine clamped together. Consider a squidgy, man-shaped sack of goo, with all the things that need to go into it and the things that need to come out of it. Squeeze it into a tin can and hurl it at the sky. Oomsk and all.
Gary McKinnon was looking for aliens. Or so he says. He’s the British hacker wanted by the United States for breaking into computer systems belonging to Nasa and the Pentagon, all because he wanted to find evidence for UFOs. Nobody wants him to be extradited, but he probably will be anyway. Mid-hack, he says, he found photos of spaceships, and an Excel list of military personnel entitled ‘Non-Terrestrial Officers’. No more details, alas. They could be sexy, but they could go whumm. I suppose we’ll never know.
McKinnon’s seems to be the strangest of cases. On one side you have the pro-Gary camp, whose primary tactic seems to be to belittle him at every turn. ‘Asperger’s Syndrome!’ they cry. ‘Harmless weirdo loner! Didn’t wash much! Hunting for aliens! In his pants!’ On the other, you have evil, glowering prosecutors in America, who aren’t saying much. It’s not even clear if they buy the whole ‘aliens’ thing at all, or if they reckon McKinnon is actually your proper international hacker villain. Like in Mission: Impossible.
Either way, it strikes me that there is only one reason why this has all been allowed to drag on for eight years, and that’s because McKinnon isn’t Muslim. Or Middle Eastern. Or Asian, or North African. Or any sort of non-white, really. Hell, particularly tanned and Spanish would probably do it. Bluntly, if the guy was in any way dusky of hue, I simply don’t believe that he wouldn’t have been bundled off over there years ago, perhaps with a bag on his head. Aliens? Yeah right, Abdul. Tell it to the waterboard.
Aside from having that slight David Icke/David Bowie thing going on around the eyes, McKinnon looks like somebody’s son or uncle. Somebody normal who just sat at his desk and got carried away. And because of that, it’s easy to forget that the big argument should have nothing to do with his personal circumstances. McKinnon sat down at a computer, here, and committed a crime. That crime had ramifications in America, sure, but he can only have committed it here, because here is where he was. So, either we allow people to be extradited for crimes committed here, or we don’t. Either we hand ’em over, or we deal with ’em ourselves.
Me, I’d vote for the latter every time. Only it does seem that there is another misguided conspiracy theorist in a similar situation to McKinnon, who also is alleged to have sat down at a computer in north London, to have done things that (if he is found guilty) would have been criminal here, and who America also wants to stand trial over there. That would be old blinky hooky himself, Abu Hamza. What happened to the Daily Mail campaign on behalf of him? I must have missed it.
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