Saving Gary McKinnon (13 page)

Gary’s whole demeanour told us that his life was at imminent risk.

I rang Matthew Downie at the NAS. He could tell how panicked I was and immediately arranged for us to meet Professor Jeremy Turk at Gary’s barrister’s office in Doughty Street Chambers.

Gary didn’t want to leave the house and was refusing to come with me but I knew he had to see someone urgently and I had no intention of leaving him alone. He trusted me and he trusted Lucy and Karen, so Lucy and I told him that Karen needed to speak to him urgently and we had to go. It was difficult to get Gary to even walk out of the door. His mind was in a dark place and it was becoming almost impossible to reach him. I knew I could lose him if we waited but we eventually got him into the car and into town.

Doughty Street Chambers is next to the Charles Dickens Museum, which used to be Dickens’s London house. Sadly our judicial system was also beginning to feel Dickensian.

When we arrived at the chambers Professor Simon Baron-Cohen was there waiting to introduce Gary to Professor Turk. Both of them had just flown into Heathrow and came straight from the airport to Doughty Street.

We waited outside while Professor Turk spent time with Gary, who broke down and wept continuously. We were informed that Gary was most definitely suicidal and he was put on immediate medication. Gary hates taking medication but for the first time he didn’t resist it: although the drugs made him feel zombie-like, his mind needed to be cocooned for now. It was a survival thing and we were all painfully aware of just how close we had come to tragedy.

We made arrangements for Professor Turk to oversee Gary’s psychiatric care on a regular basis and to monitor his medication.

In November 2009, Home Secretary Alan Johnson announced that he would not block extradition.

Later that month I gave evidence to the cross-party Home Affairs Select Committee in Portcullis House. Gary’s barrister told me that it was unprecedented for a lay person to be invited to give evidence under these circumstances. Committee chairman Keith Vaz obviously understood the importance of taking evidence from people directly affected by extradition.

I felt that I managed to get important points across and that the committee listened and took on board what I’d said.

Alan Johnson was called afterwards to give evidence and to be questioned by the committee. A lot of what he said was clearly wrong but as he gave evidence after me, I was unable to correct his errors.

Just after a break, before going back into the inquiry, Alan Johnson walked past me in the corridor outside the Thatcher Room, completely surrounded by a female contingent, apparently to ensure I couldn’t speak to him. I held out my hand to shake his and he responded with an extremely brief brushing of the hand, while continuing to walk along the corridor, not stopping for a second. His female colleagues/advisers encircling him as he walked made for an incredibly odd scene.

The taste of salty tears on my lower lip made me annoyed at myself. It’s just that I had stupidly expected more from him, and even from the female colleagues who encircled him. Alan Johnson was shown inordinate compassion from others after his mother died when he was a child. You foolishly assume that
compassion begets compassion, but although Gordon Brown had felt compassion for Gary, it seems that Alan Johnson had not.

No politician in or out of power should be allowed to pronounce someone guilty when there has been no trial, as this flies in the face of the foundation of British justice. To publicly attack a British citizen, presumably in order to ingratiate yourself with another government, is to my mind an act beneath contempt.

As if things weren’t bad enough, in December 2009 death threats were directed against Gary and me, and against almost every journalist who had reported the least bit favourably on our case. One such email said, ‘We will start hurting British citizens every day that you continue your stance against US extradition … You will be contacted when this happens so you know we are for fucking real.’

Afua Hirsch from
The Guardian
wrote: ‘The irony is that one of the arguments being put forward by McKinnon is that such is the intensity of hatred towards him in the US that he would not be treated fairly. Maybe death threats against journalists will end up forming part of his legal team’s submissions.’

The journalists called the police in. The death threats Gary and I received from the same source were personal and more sinister, and frightening enough that we also had to call the police in. We started watching the cars behind us, wondering if we were being followed, and would turn off several times to lose any car we had concerns about. We would start to think people were looking sinister, like the man in sunglasses at the bus stop outside the house who looked out of place somehow, and like a
cartoon image of a spy. We were suddenly thrust into living in a
Bourne Identity
-type scenario. Anyone approaching us suddenly or unexpectedly, or calling at our door, possibly wanting to read our meter or clean our windows, put us on our guard.

Death threats have to be taken seriously and we became vigilant to the point that we even started checking under our car for bombs. We were shocked when one day we found an object on the underside of our car. It looked like a small mobile phone inside a pouch fixed to our car with magnets. A friend who was with us told us it was a tracker and we stupidly pulled it off in a panic and smashed it into the ground. Had it been a bomb, we would most likely have been blown to smithereens.

We had no idea whether whoever was tracking our movements was the person or people who had sent us death threats, or the US government, or a journalist trying to find out where Gary was so they could photograph him. Of course, we imagined only the worst.

There had been a man running a website for American expats who claimed to have worked for the US embassy and professed to have been to funerals with American Presidents, and his rhetoric against Gary seemed similar to the style of writing that was used in the death threats. The police investigated and found that the threats came from a man in America. No prosecution was ever initiated by the UK or the US. We firmly believed that had the position been reversed the US would have extradited whoever was responsible for death threats against one of their countrymen.

It was a freezing cold day on 15 December when Gary’s friend Dhiren and Lucy helped arrange a demo for Gary outside the Home Office. Mark from the Free Gary website publicised detailed directions and excellent advice on what to do and what not to do and what rights protesters have. Nick Clegg knew
about the demo and his assistant rang asking me to meet Nick Clegg in his office for a chat. I had to say no as the demo was a priority, but I said that he was welcome to come along to the demo and to speak to me there.

Nick’s assistant got back to me a few times to press me on coming to Nick’s office for a chat but I was pleased when Nick decided to brave the cold and to stand by my side to demonstrate in support of Gary remaining in the UK. Gary’s brilliant MP, David Burrowes, was also there, plus Keith Vaz, Danny Alexander, Kate Hoey, Alistair Carmichael, Chris Huhne and also Andrew MacKinlay, who had bravely resigned over Gary. A large contingent of Twitter friends came to the demo to add their support. I was proud of them, and of all of the politicians who braved the intense cold and took the time to come out onto the street outside the Home Office to support Gary and to hold ‘Free Gary’ banners in the air.

The thing is, at one time you would see a demo and interviews on TV and the next day they were gone and on to something new. But now if you record the footage and post it on Twitter and YouTube, you can extend its lifespan indefinitely – across the world. If people empathise or relate to a story or an interview, they will retweet it many times over and even a year or two later other people will pick up on it, making it a sort of permanent living historical record of things that people fought for or against at the time.

A young primary school boy from Belgium was asked by his parents what he wanted for his birthday, and he said that he wanted to go to London to join the demo to support Gary’s fight against extradition – and, amazingly, his parents brought him. We were incredibly moved.

I had never used social media, including Twitter, which was fairly new at the time, until Wilson signed me up for it to help
in my fight for Gary. It proved to be one of the best tools for campaigning that there is. There are some really good people on Twitter who care passionately about justice, including experienced campaigners and organisations only too eager to help if you are floundering.

Graham Linehan, writer of
Father Ted
and
The IT
Crowd
, contacted me when I first went onto Twitter and, although we had never met, posted tweets to his followers asking them to follow me. There are also MPs and other celebrities on Twitter who leap forward to support you without being asked. Sally Bercow was also very supportive and as well as reposting my tweets she spoke up for Gary on Twitter and on TV many times, as did Terry Christian on
The Wright Stuff
. Sally and Speaker John Bercow have a son with autistic spectrum disorder, and supported Gary being tried in the UK.

Twitter friend Mike Garrick, who I’ve never met in reality, campaigned constantly for Gary and he and his friend Ed Johnson were responsible for helping over 5,000 people to put ‘Free Gary’ twibbons on their Twitter avatars.

We were thrilled when Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross added the ‘Free Gary’ twibbon logo to their avatars and kept it on for months. This helped to bring even more supporters on board.

The power of Twitter is phenomenal: it is a place where people power thrives on an international level.

The demo outside the Home Office was the first time I had met many Twitter friends, including the amazing Kevin Healey from Staffordshire Adult Autistic Society (SAAS), who is the most astounding campaigner, and the inspirational and invaluable Claire Simmons. Claire had seen me on TV and decided I needed help, which became ongoing as she worked tirelessly, joining me in writing letters, comments and emails, making telephone calls, and lodging Freedom of Information requests.

Friends O and J came to virtually every single demo for Gary. Oliviea’s voice is as loud as mine, so whenever I was being interviewed she was able to take over and lead the loud chant that the crowd followed.

The police supervising the December demo were friendly, but were much more alert than anyone could have realised, because suddenly in the blink of an eye the police tackled a smartly dressed man holding a package and walking towards the Home Office, pinning him to the ground in what seemed like a split second. This left us all wondering what mystery we had just witnessed.

I had brought flowers and a letter to hand in to the Queen, asking her to help to stop the extradition. The police told us that we weren’t allowed to protest outside Buckingham Palace but lots of the protestors followed us as we made our way there. When we arrived at the gates of the palace several of the police behind the gates were armed with machine guns and looked very intimidating.

Standing there with my letter for the Queen in my hand, I thought about how virtually one hundred years earlier Emmeline Pankhurst was arrested at the gates of Buckingham Palace when she tried to present a petition to George V, and how in June 1913 suffragette Emily Wilding Davison died when she threw herself under the King’s horse in her fight for women’s rights.

If not for the bravery and sacrifice of women like these, how very different might the lives of women have been today?

I could see other policemen behind the gates of the palace, who were unarmed and friendly. They smiled and said they were expecting us and to leave the flowers with them, but suddenly one of the policemen received a phone call and said, ‘Hold on. I’ve just been informed that Gary’s mum, you,’ he smiled, ‘have been invited to take the flowers into the palace, but no one else can go in.’

The two friendly policemen who had been supervising the Home Office protest were still with us and they got really excited and announced to everyone: ‘She’s going in, they’re taking her in.’

I walked into the palace on my own, holding my letter and trying to hold masses of bouquets that Lucy and the supporters had added to mine.

One of the policemen helped me to carry the flowers to the entrance of the palace but put them back on top of the bundle in my arms when I was going inside. My face and hair were buried in sweet-smelling roses, lilies, carnations and chrysanthemums, overwhelming the senses. I could hardly see where I was walking as I tried to stop the abundance of flowers falling from my arms.

The entrance to the first section of the palace I walked into was like an ancient castle and there was a large desk on the right-hand side.

I walked up a staircase that led to various rooms and the Queen’s secretary was there, smiling as I peeked through the petals. He and a lady started gathering the bouquets from me to deliver to the Queen, as they chatted warmly and assured me that the Queen would personally read my letter and that Gary’s case was very high profile.

When I came out, the policemen were all asking me what it was like and everyone was smiling. To be honest I can barely remember what it was like as I was smothered in flowers and all I could think of was that the Queen would now be well aware of Gary’s plight. I hoped with all my heart that she might use her influence to help him.

With the highly controversial 2003 extradition treaty signed under Tony Blair’s government using the Queen’s prerogative, no British citizen was safe. Extradition could now happen even
when you had never left your own country, had never fled from any other country and were not a fugitive – all without any evidence ever being presented against you.

It is an undisputable fact – as we discovered from Freedom of Information requests – that no American citizen has ever been extradited to the UK for any crime that took place while they were physically on American soil.