Another victim of the United States’ obsessive anti-China strategy
Jan 17, 2025
The law and politics can be callous. And it certainly has been in the case of 56-year-old Dan Duggan, a former US Marines pilot, now an Australian citizen. Five days before Christmas the federal Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus announced Mr Duggan would be extradited to the United States to face charges relating to allegations, vehemently denied by Mr Duggan, that he breached arms trafficking laws and engaged in money laundering and conspiracy offences, by training Chinese pilots in South Africa between 2010 and 2012. On Tuesday, Mr Duggan’s family announced it was appealing Mr Dreyfus’ decision.
Whether that appeal succeeds is a matter for the Federal Court and this article does not speculate on the likelihood or otherwise of the appeal.
But there are a number of aspects of Mr Duggan’s case that are deeply troubling.
Mr Duggan faces a possible 65 years in a US jail if he is convicted of the offences. Given his age this is an effective death penalty. Under the extradition treaty between the US and Australia, extradition must be refused if the death penalty is sought by the prosecution. An effective death penalty should be subject to this provision.
And like the Australian publisher and journalist Julian Assange (this writer advised the Australian Assange Campaign) there is a very high risk Mr Duggan would be detained in a torture chamber, otherwise known as a ‘Supermax’ prison, despite any ‘assurances’ the US authorities give Australia about that issue.
Mr Duggan has already been held in maximum security in a New South Wales prison for over two years. Such facilities effectively amount to cruel and unusual punishment and torture being inflicted on the prisoner. On what plausible basis could Mr Duggan have been classified by the correctional authorities as such a danger to society that he needed to be kept in maximum security? Likely answer – none.
It is also troubling that Mr Duggan appears to be being used by the US and its allies as part of the obsessive anti-China strategy. This is a point made by Paul Gregoire recently. Writing in Declassified Australia recently Gregoire observed that Mr Duggan has effectively been sold out by ASIO. He sets out the history of the dealings Mr Duggan has had with the security organisation.
In essence the ASIO connection and conduct in relation to Mr Duggan is this. After leaving South Africa and prior to his moving to China in 2013 to work in the aviation industry, there were two meetings between Duggan and an ASIO officer, at the second of which was an agent from the US Naval Central Intelligence Service. ASIO encouraged Duggan to go to China, despite him saying he wouldn’t if it was a problem. As Gregoire describes it; “The father-of-six has explained that not only did the ASIO agents not discourage him from working in China as a consultant, but in fact he considered they were seeking to recruit him to spy for ASIO by gathering information and contacts for them.” Mr Duggan appealed to the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security but to no avail.
There are other legal manouvres in the case that makes it reek of politics, as Dr Glenn Kolomeitz, principal lawyer and intelligence analyst at Cardinal Legal, who’s been providing advice to the Duggan family, said in an interview with Gregoire.
Given that, even on the most favourable view to the US, Mr Duggan’s case can been seen to be, as noted above, an element of the US-Australian anti-China strategy, one wonders why this is not a case in which extradition should be refused by Mr Dreyfus on the basis that it is an “offence…of a political character”, to quote the Australia-US extradition treaty.
But let’s focus on what might happen to Mr Duggan if his appeal against extradition is unsuccessful. As noted above, this was highly relevant in the pursuit of Julian Assange by the United States.
Mr Duggan’s trial is likely to be held in the District of Columbia, which is where the grand jury in the matter has been deliberating. The issue will be whether Mr Duggan can get a fair trial in a jurisdiction where jury members are drawn from government, including family members of defence and security state officials. Unlikely one would have thought.
There is also, as noted above, the issue of the conditions of detention. Given the irrational approach of governments on the question of risk, both here and in the US, to anyone charged with offences related to national security, it is highly likely Mr Duggan would be held in conditions that breach international human rights and detention rules, protocols and conventions. The District of Colombia’s prison system fails to meet, on a daily basis, the basic rights of prisoners. And if Mr Duggan was sent to a Supermax somewhere else in the US he would be subjected to solitary confinement, a form of torture.
The Duggan case is a dangerous precedent. As the Assange case showed us, when it comes to national security criminal cases Washington’s desire to punish knows no bounds.