Tell the Attorney-General: Free Dan Duggan!

Next week former US Navy Top Gun pilot Dan Duggan, a naturalised Australian, will belatedly lodge his final submission to the Attorney-General against his extradition to the United States.

(Duggan’s attempt to lodge his final submission last month was interrupted by the CrowdStrike outage.)

A Duggan spokesman said his submission will explain the injustice he and his family have suffered, the political motivation behind his mistreatment, the complete lack of evidence and facts in the US indictment against him, and the way in which the USA is extending itself into Australia and compromising our national sovereignty.

Despite having no criminal record, and no Australian charges against him, Dan Duggan has been in maximum security for 22 months, since his arrest while dropping his small children at school in October 2022.

Much of that time has been spent in solitary confinement.

He’s been moved three times, the last to a prison further away from his wife Saffrine and their children, and further away from his legal team.

After so much time in prison, Duggan has written a poem, Love Trumps Power, reflecting on his love for his six children, and for his wife who spends every spare moment travelling the countryside, building support for the family’s fight for justice.

The poem opens:

“Is it to be Power or Love that will win the day?
In a ‘David v Goliath’ battle, a family embroiled in geo-political fray …
The children’s Love is beautiful, kind, warm, infinite, from all six,
Power is often ugly, nasty, cold, secret, enough to make you sick.
In solitude thought of ‘laughter silvered wings’, he ‘dances the skies’
His heart soaring as he dreams of his wife’s loving eyes …”

Making an example

Through no fault of his own, Dan Duggan and his family have been caught in the middle of America’s geopolitical confrontation with China, which Australia’s spineless major-party politicians have betrayed our independent national interest, and their duty to protect Australian citizens, to support.

Duggan is a former Top Gun pilot who emigrated to Australia, set up a joy flight business, married an Australian woman and started a family, and became a naturalised citizen.

He trained Chinese pilots on a short-term contract at a South African test flight school in 2012, a time when everyone in the USA and Australia were rushing to do business with fast-growing China, and China’s rising standard of living was driving unprecedented demand for air travel and, therefore, trained pilots.

Duggan insists he did not train military pilots or provide military training, and the training he did provide was no more than what is publicly available in training manuals online, and therefore not secret, which British pilots at the South African school confirm.

The murkiest part of the case is that the CIA visited the school in 2012, and did not express any concern about the training, but wanted the school to effectively spy on the Chinese pilots for the CIA, which the school refused.

Also in 2012, back in Australia, ASIO and a US intelligence agency met with Duggan, again not concerned about the training he did in South Africa, but more interested in the consultancy business he was starting in China, and asked him to look out for ranking people in China to introduce to them.

Duggan initially wanted to cooperate, but after a US intelligence operation put him at risk, the relationship broke down; only after that, in 2017, did the Trump administration’s Department of Justice indict him.

The DoJ’s indictment of Duggan seems to be some sort of payback, but instead of indicting him for his quite legal activities in China, they cobbled together trumped-up charges that his work in South Africa violated the USA’s International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), padded out with the obligatory conspiracy and money laundering charges to load up the maximum sentence. (The DoJ has something like a 99 per cent conviction rate because it extorts its targets with threats of multi-decade sentences into plea bargaining for much shorter sentences.)

The Australian Federal Police arrested Duggan soon after his return to Australian in 2022, to facilitate a US extradition request, even though the charges don’t meet the most basic dual criminality test for extradition under Australia’s extradition treaty with the USA, which requires the alleged act to be a crime in both countries.

With Duggan’s impeccable record and family ties in Australia, he could have been held in house arrest or some equivalent, but instead he has been subjected to the harsh punishment of maximum security.

Moreover, not content with this cruel abuse of Duggan and his family, the US authorities succeeded in getting an Australian court to freeze the sale of Saffrine Duggan’s property, to stop the family from having funds to pay for his legal defence.

Led by the extraordinary Bernard Collaery—who has experience with Australia’s intelligence agencies having represented Witness K in the Timor Leste spying case, and was even prosecuted himself until the charges were dropped—Duggan’s legal team in Australia is having to work pro bono to defend him, because they have no money except what they receive in donations from the public, which they have had to spend on US lawyers, who won’t work pro bono, to research the US laws under which Duggan is being charged.

There is nothing fair about what Dan Duggan and his family have been subjected to, and there is very little chance he will receive a fair hearing if extradited to the United States, because the American government is only interested in making an example of him for its hysterical agenda of demonising all contact and cutting off economic ties with China.

Australians should call and email Attorney General Mark Dreyfus to demand he stop torturing this Australian family to please the United States, and instead free Dan Duggan!

What you can do

Call or email Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus
Electorate office: 03 9580 4651 Parliament office: 02 6277 7300
Emails: Mark.Dreyfus.MP@aph.gov.au and/or attorney@ag.gov.au

Donate to Dan and Saffrine Duggan and their family, who need all the help they can get.

Click here to watch Australian Citizens Party Research Director Robert Barwick’s latest interview update on Dan Duggan, given to The Canada Files on YouTube.