Gitmo torture for UFO hacker?

A British hacker obsessed with the American military's UFO cover-up may be tortured forever at Guantanamo Bay if he's turned over to the United States.

Gary McKinnon, a 40-year-old nerd who was arrested by U.K. authorities back in 2002, had been seeking proof that the U.S. Defense Department and NASA were engaged in a massive conspiracy to hide the truth about extraterrestrial spacecraft.

Since his arrest, McKinnon's lawyers have been fighting Washington's attempts to extradite him. Even if tried in a court of law, the UFO-crazed hacker faces up to 70 years in federal prison for simply looking around U.S. government computers running on unprotected Windows systems.

But at his latest extradition hearing on April 12, McKinnon's defense team told the judge they fear the bumbling hacker will become an "enemy combatant" and locked up in a secret U.S. military prison where he'll be tortured like so many other foreigners and never given a legal trial.

Countless "enemy combatants" have been imprisoned and tortured by the United States since Washington abandoned constitutional protections for Americans and the Geneva Convention's anti-torture rules for everybody else.

"The U.S. government wants to extract some kind of species of administrative revenge because he exposed their security systems as weak and helpless as they were," defense attorney Edmund Lawson told the court.

Asked to guarantee that McKinnon wouldn't be named an "enemy combatant" and locked away forever in a military torture camp, the American prosecutors produced a bizarre unsigned note on U.S. Embassy stationary.

The "unsigned and anonymous" note "isn't worth the paper it's written on," Lawson said.

The British judge adjourned the extradition hearing until May 10, when he is expected to announce whether London will give up McKinnon to the American torturers.

McKinnon says he didn't find clear proof of the conspiracy, but he did stumble upon some intriguing clues.

"I found a list of officers' names," he told the Guardian last year, 'under the heading Non-Terrestrial Officers.

"It doesn't mean little green men. What I think it means is not earth-based. I found a list of fleet-to-fleet transfers, and a list of ship names. I looked them up. They weren't U.S. navy ships. What I saw made me believe they have some kind of spaceship, off-planet."