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Australian citizen and former US Navy “Top Gun” pilot Dan Duggan faces an extradition hearing in Sydney this Friday, but only because Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus has hitherto refused to uphold Australian law.
Duggan, who has spent 18 months in solitary confinement in Lithgow Correctional Centre away from his wife Saffrine and six children, should not have spent one day in prison because the Attorney-General should never have approved his arrest on the request of the United States.
The reason why is that Duggan’s case does not meet the most important condition of Australia’s extradition treaty with the United States.
That condition is “dual criminality”—the crime for which an extradition is approved must be a crime in both countries—but the alleged crimes for which the US Department of Justice has indicted Dan Duggan are not crimes in Australia, period.
The DoJ is accusing Duggan of passing on US military secrets by training Chinese military pilots in South Africa in 2012—which he denies, saying he (and the dozens of other top gun trainers who haven’t been arrested) only trained civilians—but the specific charges in the indictment are breaches of the US Arms Export Control Act, which are not breaches of any Australian law.
Corrupt subservience to America
The fact that, knowing this, AG Dreyfus approved Duggan’s arrest in October 2022, shows that Duggan’s is yet another case where the Australian government is choosing to put its strategic and frankly pathetic subservience to the USA ahead of the law and the welfare of an Australian citizen.
In the case of Julian Assange, Australian governments have not objected to the Americans seeking to apply US law extraterritorially against an Australian citizen who does not live under US jurisdiction and wasn’t even present in the United States when the alleged crime was committed (although, belatedly, because Australian public opinion has swung behind Assange, the Albanese government has advocated for his release, whilst still not objecting to the principle of extraterritoriality).
In the case of war crimes coverup whistleblower David McBride, Mark Dreyfus’s refusal to use his power to end the prosecution on public interest grounds led to the November court hearing in which the judge took away McBride’s defence on national security grounds, to protect information related to Australia’s dealings with the United States.
No confidence in rule of law
Given that Dreyfus did not block the US extradition request on the basis of it not meeting the black-and-white requirement of dual criminality from the get-go, the Australian public can have no confidence in the legal process to which Dan Duggan is being subjected, which appears to be riddled with corruption and dirty tricks to rig the outcome the Americans are demanding.
Examples include:
- Duggan’s arrest despite no dual criminality;
- Duggan’s treatment in prison, including his solitary confinement, being shackled and dressed in an orange jumpsuit when moved, and not being allowed to use a computer to work on his defence, not even one not connected to the internet, despite being on remand and the only prisoner at Lithgow Correctional Centre not convicted of a crime;
- The AG’s office officially not commenting on the case, but discreetly backgrounding journalists to read the US indictment so the reporting of the case is coloured by the US allegations as if they are true;
- A court ruling for the Americans to freeze the sale of his wife’s farming property as “proceeds of crime” to stop it funding his defence—despite the property being worth many times more than the $180,000 Duggan earned in total from the South African flight school work for which he’s been indicted; and
- The hostility of the magistrate handling his case, who upheld the US freezing his wife’s asset so it can’t be used to fund his defence, and ruled against Duggan receiving legal aid, saying [paraphrase] “he’s a smart guy, he can defend himself” (consequently, Duggan’s core legal team is working pro bono for now, against the full legal might of the USA).
Why Dan Duggan?
After 18 months of such treatment, and facing his final hearing which may see him extradited to the USA and jailed for more than 60 years, Dan Duggan has finally revealed information that explains the mystery of why, given the number of former military pilots who worked at the same South African training school as Duggan, only he has been arrested and treated this way.
The information Duggan has just revealed in a letter he hand-wrote from prison is that after he worked at the South African school, but before he started his airline industry consultancy business in China, Australia’s spy agency ASIO and the US Navy Central Intelligence Service contacted him to ask him to spy for them in China.
According to Duggan, the spy agencies indicated no problem with what he did in South Africa, but were keen on him to start his business in China.
Duggan was taken aback, but as a patriotic military-trained person, he agreed to cooperate, except he didn’t do any spying, and the relationship broke down when US actions caused Duggan to come under suspicion in China, resulting in him being blocked from leaving China for seven years.
After the relationship broke down, the US DoJ indicted him in 2017, which wasn’t acted on until 2022, when he was finally back in Australia.
Australian Citizens Party Research Director Robert Barwick broke the news of this stunning revelation in a 16 May 2024 YouTube interview with Daniel Dumbrill: Breaking Info: The US Punishes Their Unwilling Australian Asset & His Family, New Dan Duggan Details
Robert Barwick questioned whether the entire action against Dan Duggan is some kind of payback by the intelligence agencies, and called on Australians to support Duggan and his family:
- by demanding that AG Mark Dreyfus uphold Australian law; and
- by supporting the family’s legal fighting fund.
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