The news that UFO-hunting super-hacker Gary McKinnon has been given two weeks' "interim relief" from being hauled off to the US in shackles to face terrorism charges is a cause for both alarm and joy.

McKinnon, a Glaswegian by birth, allegedly crashed the entire military computer system in Washington DC. The US authorities' request for his extradition was granted by the UK and subsequent appeals to the High Court and Lords failed. However, the European Court of Human Rights has granted interim relief for two weeks until a full chamber hearing of the case. This is a cause for joy among those, like me, who believe extraditing McKinnon is pointless and wrong.

The cause for alarm is that his case got to this stage in the first place. In 2006 I met McKinnon in a London pub for an interview for The Herald Magazine. He was wild-eyed and rambled about ETs and top-secret "gravity-defying" technology. He told me he was drunk and stoned when he hacked during all-night sessions. He used an old-fashioned dial-up 56k modem, jumping through US university sites and hundreds of PCs per second. His trick was accessing systems where the real users hadn't bothered to use password protection. Once, he cheekily left a note for military personnel telling them their security was bad. His boozy brain thought it was all harmless fun of a "carry on hacking" variety.

In case anyone thinks I am making light of all this, I am not. He shouldn't have hacked anything and he should be punished. But the punishment should fit the crime. McKinnon was not aiding terrorists. Initially, he faced charges under a UK Computer Misuse Act. This was a smokescreen. It was America's authorities who wanted McKinnon, not the UK's. Two months after his arrest, officers from the Met's high-tech crime unit returned from a trip to the US and McKinnon was suddenly reclassified as a real threat.

The overreaction of the US reminded me of a low-key movie called The Hunting Party, which appeared this summer. I doubt you've seen it. I was interested in it because it's based on a true story involving a pal of mine, American journalist Scott Anderson, who thought it would be fun to try and track down war-criminal Radovan Karadzic in 2000, along with some other reporters. This two-week vacation-caper took a dark turn when the hapless hacks realised locals protecting Karadzic thought they were really all undercover CIA operatives. Even the UN stationed in the area thought they were spies.

Eventually, the real CIA did appear, and soon Anderson and his gang were threatened with extradition and military trial back in the US. They panicked and fled the region. Thankfully, they ran straight into the arms of a Hollywood producer. You simply couldn't make it up. This case involving Gary McKinnon falls into the same category. He's a clown who wandered into the shadows.

I have met US terrorism experts and CIA operatives who conduct the covert part of the so-called "war on terror" on a daily basis, and it would be an understatement to say they are fired up and desperate to catch the bad guys. They're also haunted by the thought another September 11 could happen on their watch. They see cyberspace as being the clearing house for a lot of nasty characters' communications - and rightly so.

But I can't believe it's solely the US's intelligence community that want to nail McKinnon. Instead I think there are political fingerprints all over the case against him. The men in suits in Washington DC want to make an example out of the Scot. This, though, is 2008, and the international community is no longer willing to bend to dossiers that seem too good to be true.

The UK's intelligence community has existed since Elizabethan times, and invented many dirty tricks to get out of tight corners. When it faced disturbing claims made by rogue MI5 spy David Shayler, for example, Whitehall handled the situation by spreading nasty disinformation about him among the press. I know, because I was exposed to some of it myself. Eventually, the truthful but reckless Shayler was sentenced to a deliberately risible six months in jail. His serious claims were sidelined because he was undermined as a source. In McKinnon's case, the US is doing the reverse - they're trying to make him look serious. Having met him, I can tell you they've got a hell of a job on their hands.

Gary McKinnon is guilty of many things. But nothing he did merits decades in Guantanamo Bay-type surroundings. If no-one in power will publicly speak up in his defence, then maybe someone from Downing Street, or even Holyrood, can quietly have a word on his behalf with the people close to the judges in the European Court of Human Rights to ensure that he's dealt with on this side of the Atlantic. It's time to stop this farce and get back to catching real terrorists.