by Sharp, Janis
I couldn’t believe that I wasn’t nervous while talking on TV, but it was because I was so busy fighting Gary’s corner that I didn’t think about myself at all. I knew all about the extradition treaty and how it wasn’t supposed to be able to be used retrospectively, yet it was. When the interview was over I felt I had done OK.
Fern Britton and Phillip Schofield interviewed media lawyer Mark Stephens at the same time as interviewing me. I thought that Mark Stephens had been brought in to give the US point of view but I was amazed at how well he put Gary’s case across.
Mark was saying that instead of the US concentrating on catching the likes of al-Qaeda they were instead wasting time and money in pursuing Gary McKinnon for years on end, which in his opinion was a ridiculous waste of resources.
You tend to find that one interview leads to another. Russia Today asked me to go into their London studio to do an interview with Moscow on 22 January, and they sent a car to collect us.
On the way there the car took detour after detour. Wilson had fallen asleep and I was feeling panicky and was trying to wake him up quietly, as I was worried about where the driver was taking us.
At one point we ended up almost back at the same place the car had been driving along half an hour before. I started becoming convinced that they were going to kidnap us and hold us hostage to try to get hold of Gary to use him in some way. I was sweating and scared and wanted out of the car, but it was driving too fast.
Then we got a phone call telling us that we were being taken to the TV studio for an in-depth interview as it was too late for the live link to Moscow. The car drove into a back yard that looked like the kind of place on TV where people are murdered or kidnapped, and we were transferred into another car. I could hear my heart thumping loudly in my ears.
Suddenly the car stopped and we were taken through a door into a reception area. I was wondering if it was a Russian MI5-type building, but it turned out to be the building for RT TV and the relief was overwhelming. I also felt silly for letting my imagination run riot, but because the US were going to such lengths to pursue Gary, I thought that the Russians might also want him for some reason and might be kidnapping us to get to Gary.
Fear can make you irrational and paranoid.
I’ve also since discovered that some of the drivers sent by the TV studios either don’t know their way around London very well or take illogical detours.
It turned out to be a good week for us. On 23 January, Justice Maurice Kay ruled that the diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome was unequivocal and that, combined with other medical evidence, a judicial review against the Home Secretary’s decision to extradite was justified.
This was a massive relief: it not only gave us more time to fight, it also made us feel more optimistic about a good outcome.
I started crying in court and Karen started crying too, and Ronke Phillips from ITV London Tonight news said, ‘Why are you both crying? Have you lost?’
Through tears of relief I said, ‘No, we’ve won a judicial review.’
Karen and I were laughing and crying and Ronke was beaming as we headed out of the court to do TV interviews.
We lived for days like this. No matter how bad things got or how hopeless they looked, something always came up at the last minute to keep us going.
On 26 January Boris Johnson wrote an article in the Telegraph in support of Gary. It was written with typical Boris humour and made me laugh out loud, but Boris is clearly more intelligent than many people realise as he was one of the few to understand exactly what Gary had done and how he had done it.
Boris wrote:
Gary McKinnon believes in little green men – but it doesn’t make him a terrorist.
Way to go, Mr President. It is good news that he is getting rid of Guantanamo and water-boarding and extraordinary rendition. 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.
To listen to the ravings of the US military, you would think that Mr McKinnon is a threat to national security on a par with Osama bin Laden. According to the Americans, this mild-mannered computer programmer has done more damage to their war-fighting capabilities than all the orange-pyjama-clad suspects of Guantanamo combined…
In their continuing rage at this electronic lèse-majesté, the Americans want us to send him over there to face trial, and the possibility of a seventy-year jail sentence. It is a comment on American bullying and British spinelessness that this farce is continuing, because Gary McKinnon is not and never has been any kind of threat to American security. He had only one reason for fossicking around in the databanks of Pentagon computers … Mr McKinnon believes in UFOs, and he is one of the large number of people who think that there is a gigantic conspiracy to conceal their existence from the rest of us.
I am not so brave as to claim that UFOs do not exist. The Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees, has said he believes in life forms on other planets, and no decent empiricist could rule out the possibility.
It may be that David Icke is right, and that the world is run by giant lizards in disguise. Perhaps supersized saurians have been sent, in preparation for the great lizard takeover. Maybe political lizards will hail the arrival of the lizard mother ship as it perches on the mountain top.
All this is certainly theoretically possible, just as it is possible that there really was an accident involving an alien spacecraft at Roswell, and that there really is an extra-large teapot in orbit around Mars. It is just that I happen to think it vanishingly unlikely, and we have a word for people who persist in believing in alien abduction. They are cranks, and they do not deserve to be persecuted and have their lives ruined.
Gary McKinnon wasn’t even a proper hacker. He did something called ‘blank password scanning’, and because these military computers were so dumb as to lack proper passwords, he was able to roam around their intestines in search of evidence of little green men. He was so innocent and un-furtive that he left his own email address, and messages such as ‘Your security is crap.’ And yes, since you ask, he does think that he found evidence that the US military is infiltrated by beings from the planet Tharg. He even knows the names and ranks of various non-terrestrial officers, though unfortunately they have been deleted from his hard drive.
It is brutal, mad and wrong even to consider sending this man to America for trial. He has been diagnosed as having Asperger’s syndrome, for heaven’s sake. How can the British government be so protoplasmic, so pathetic, so heedless of the well-being of its own people, as to sign the warrant for his extradition? We treat a harmless UFO-believer as an international terrorist … The British government is obviously too feeble to help Mr McKinnon.
It is time for Barack Obama to invest in some passwords that are slightly more difficult to crack.
It is time for the new President to let our people go. To persist with this extradition is so cruel and so irrational that the only plausible explanation is that beneath their suits the US Justice Department and the UK Home Office are occupied by a conspiracy of great green gibbering geckos from outer space.
Radio and TV stations were ringing up for interview after interview, one of which was with Richard and Judy.
I remember feeling a bit nervous when I walked into the studio, as I wasn’t sure what to expect. Michael Jackson’s sister La Toya was on the programme and Richard and Judy asked her if she felt that President Obama would be a better president. La Toya said she absolutely believed that he would be.
I added, ‘Apparently he’s also appointed somebody who’s going to reveal the truth about UFOs.’ La Toya looked at me and smiled and went on to discuss her brother, whose music and dancing I loved.
I spoke about Gary and said that now that President Obama was in po
wer I had hope that Gary would remain in the UK.
Judy, referring to Gary, then said: ‘Like a lot of people, and goodness knows we’ve heard a lot of them, he did believe that September 11 was a conspiracy and he foolishly put that message—’ and Richard interjected, ‘on the very place that was actually “bombed”.’
This made me smile to myself as I wondered if Richard even realised that he had just said the word ‘bombed’ when referring to the Pentagon. I wondered if he also believed some of the conspiracy theories that Gary believed in, that were circulating on the internet.
On 26 February the Crown Prosecution Service announced that it would not bring charges against Gary in Britain. This meant that the US extradition request would remain live and Gary’s life was under imminent threat.
It was as though all of the help that had suddenly appeared out of the blue was a mirage that had tricked us into believing that hope was tangible, but our oasis of safety had faded and we were left stranded again.
It was the weekend and on Sunday 1 March I was wide awake at 6 a.m. I opened and closed the doors of the kitchen cupboards searching for the honey I was sure we had. Then I found it, hiding in the corner, but the jar was almost empty. I realised that the cupboards were bare as I’d forgotten to buy almost all of the things we needed. But there was just enough honey for two slices of toast.
I love honey and I like bees and worry about how they’re dying off here. I’m sure pesticides must be at the heart of it and it can’t help that everyone is obsessed with weeding out the wild flowers that the bees thrive on.
I sat drinking tea and watching the birds through the patio doors, thinking how absolutely free they looked. It must be the most amazing feeling to fly through the sky and feel the sun on your back, to soar above the clouds and be able to fly thousands of miles away to a warmer climate.
No waiting in queues to be searched or manhandled or strapped in a chair on a metal machine that is sprayed with disinfectants that can make you ill.
To build a flying machine is truly amazing, but to fly like a bird, that must be something!
I switched on the computer and looked at the newspapers online before starting to write to MPs and to anyone I thought might help us, and there on the screen was an article in the Mail on Sunday with Sting and Trudie Styler saying they had written to Jacqui Smith to plead for Gary.
I couldn’t believe it; we so needed this. I read it again. The rollercoaster of emotions leaves you feeling dizzy. I think fate plays some cruel games for its own amusement, but I thought, surely fate has to be on our side, because every time we think we’re at the end something new comes up.
My friend Josie rang me and started shouting down the phone excitedly, ‘Sting and Trudie are in the Mail on Sunday talking about Gary!’
‘I know! I’m just going to buy the paper.’
I grabbed my jacket and ran down to the paper shop. I’ve never been star-struck but have always had huge respect for people who use their position or celebrity status to help others. I was so grateful to Trudie and Sting for doing this for my son, and for highlighting the horrendous one-sided extradition treaty. I knew that this could really help us. We hugged and hoped and I was so happy that I put the Stereophonics on and turned the music up loud and danced around the room, singing ‘Dakota’ at the top of my voice. There was a good feeling in the air that was unmistakeable, and anything seemed possible.
On 16 March 2009, human rights campaigner and former Middle East hostage Terry Waite publicly called on the US to drop their charges against Gary. This wonderful man who had been held hostage, and endured the mental trauma that comes with that, cared enough about what was happening to Gary to come out to plead for his freedom from the terror of extradition. We were overwhelmed by his support and grateful to Melanie Riley for highlighting Gary’s case when discussing the extradition treaty.
Legally the US has to prove someone is a fugitive before extradition can happen, but our courts ignore this. Gary did not meet the definition of ‘fugitive’ and when the judges spoke about ‘returning’ Gary to America, Gary said: ‘How can they return me to a place I’ve never been?’
In April, another fighter for justice, legendary Oscar-winning actress Julie Christie, wrote to Home Secretary Jacqui Smith:
I am writing to express my deep concern about the case of Gary McKinnon, who currently faces the possibility of extradition to the United States to stand trial on computer hacking charges. I know that already more than a hundred MPs and peers have urged you to act on this matter and that many others, such as Terry Waite, Boris Johnson and Lord Carlile, have also made appeals to you to intervene on his behalf. My understanding of your role is that it is, amongst other things, to protect the citizens of this country, particularly the most vulnerable ones. Surely this must mean that you stand up for Gary McKinnon, who has already made it clear that he is prepared to plead guilty to offences in this country, rather than submitting to a demand from the United States, particularly in the light of all we now know about their treatment of prisoners accused of anything resembling a political offence?
I very much hope that you will make it clear, either now or at the end of the legal proceedings currently underway, that Gary McKinnon will not become yet another victim of the American criminal justice system because this country did not have the courage to stand up to bullying demands.
I felt a force of good was gathering pace and driving the fight, not only for Gary, but for the hard-won rights that British people had died to attain, that had been so brutally stripped from us by our own government, leaving us all at the mercy of foreign powers.
On January 2009 we won permission in the High Court to seek a judicial review of Jacqui Smith’s decision to uphold her original decision to extradite despite the new medical evidence and Asperger’s diagnosis.
Alan Johnson became Home Secretary on 5 June. On 9 June 2009 Gary’s QC, Edward Fitzgerald, and barrister, Ben Cooper, put in submissions, including that Ms Smith ‘under-estimated the gravity of the situation’.
It was on 3 July that a definitive game changer occurred. Karen told us that the Daily Mail was taking up Gary’s case as their new campaign and that this was the best chance we had – it would propel Gary’s case to the forefront of the news and the Daily Mail tended to win their campaigns.
I was over the moon. This was the very newspaper that ran hugely successful campaigns in support of the Gurkhas and to bring the murderers of Stephen Lawrence to justice. Now, how good was that? Paul Dacre, the editor of the Daily Mail, had decided that Gary’s case would be an honourable issue to devote a campaign to and arranged for his team to come to our house and spend time getting to know us.
Everyone said, ‘Oh, the Daily Mail will tie you up so tight that you won’t be able to move. They’ll demand exclusivity and won’t allow you to speak to any other newspapers.’ As it turned out, nothing could have been further from the truth. There were no conditions or restrictions put on us by the Mail, and the other newspapers continued to support Gary.
This was the first time we met Michael Seamark, a tall, slim, immaculately dressed man who was to oversee the Daily Mail’s campaign. Michael was intelligent, warm and easy to talk to and we liked him immediately.
Journalist Allison Pearson came to our house that day too. Allison is blonde, attractive and sharp-witted, with excellent observational skills. She wrote the first feature on our family for the Daily Mail. Allison is a very natural writer and everything she writes just flows. The result of her interview was an excellent two-page spread with detail and humanity and an in-depth explanation of Gary’s plight – and of what the prolonged threat of extradition was doing to our family.
The attention-grabbing headlines and ongoing dramatic stories by Michael Seamark and James Slack were first class and really hit the mark.
All of this led to more TV interviews, which not only raised the profile of Gary’s case but, much to the delight of the National Autistic Society, also raised the pro
file of Asperger’s syndrome and helped to educate people about autistic spectrum disorders.
CHAPTER 13
I AM NOT A NUMBER
It was 4 July 2009, American Independence Day, and I had arranged to hand a petition, and a letter signed by prominent people, into 10 Downing Street. Trudie Styler had arranged to come along to help us to highlight Gary’s case.
I was just deciding on my most conventional clothes, a black jacket and trousers, when the phone rang. ‘Is that Janis Sharp?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you know that you’re coming in to have tea with Sarah Brown, the Prime Minister’s wife, today?’
‘No. I knew I was coming in with a letter and a petition but I didn’t know I was having tea with Sarah Brown.’
‘You are indeed and Sarah is looking forward to meeting you.’
When I came off the phone and told Wilson who it was, all I kept saying was, ‘How did they get our telephone number?’
‘It’s the government, Janis; they can get anyone’s number in the blink of an eye.’
I wasn’t fazed that I was going to 10 Downing Street – but I was grateful to Sarah Brown for her compassion, which gave me hope. I’ve never felt humbled by hierarchy but have always been impressed by the extent of someone’s humanity and their courage to stand up for justice. Respect is something that has to be earned and where you are on the ladder of wealth, fame or position doesn’t come into it. It’s a spiritual thing – not religious, but spiritual.
Among other things, I respect Trudie Styler and Sting for fighting to protect the rainforest; David Gilmour and Polly Samson for their commitment to building homes for the homeless; Julie Christie and Duncan Campbell for using their voices and eloquence to stand up against injustice; and Melanie Riley, Karl Watkin, Trudie Styler, Michael Darwyne, David Bermingham and Gary Mulgrew for their fight against injustice and determination to change the 2003 extradition treaty.