Five Eyes-AUKUS gang scapegoating Aussie ‘Top Gun’ Daniel Duggan for their war agenda

The same US and Australian political forces that have normalised talk of war with China have ripped an innocent Australian away from his wife and six children, holding him in solitary confinement, to make an example of him for their agenda.

This is the conclusion the Australian Citizens Party has drawn from its investigation of the case of former US Navy “top gun” pilot, now Australian citizen Daniel Duggan, who has been held in solitary confinement for nine months waiting to see if he will be extradited to the United States.

The ACP has published its investigation in its Australian Alert Service magazine and on its website. The articles include:

Is the Attorney-General persecuting an Australian political prisoner under orders from Washington?

Attorney-General’s Department drives Australian prisoner’s ‘trial by media’

Daniel Duggan a scapegoat of Five Eyes anti-China agenda (Part 1): Britain contrives ‘Chinese military recruitment’ allegations

Daniel Duggan a scapegoat of Five Eyes anti-China agenda (Part 2): Five Eyes fingerprints on Duggan’s arrest

ACP Research Director Robert Barwick said today: “This is a terrible case, which should deeply shame all of us, because our government is destroying a beautiful Australian family solely to please Anglo-American war hawks and their Five Eyes spy network who want to make an example of Duggan for their propaganda war against China.”

Barwick cited the following elements of the case:

• The AFP arrested Duggan on 21 October 2022, and he has been designated “extreme high risk” to hold him in harsh conditions in solitary confinement in very cold Lithgow with insufficient food, blankets, medical care and access to family and legal advice.
• Five Eyes agency ASIO possibly broke the law by luring Duggan back to Australia to be arrested, which the Inspector General of Intelligence and Security is investigating.
• Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, who approved Duggan’s arrest, is improperly trying to interfere with the Australian court, by backgrounding journalists to harass the court to release the US extradition request which lists all the US allegations against Duggan, but which the court has declined to release in the interests of justice.
• Australia only extradites if the charge meets the “dual criminality” standard of being a crime in both the country seeking the extradition (USA) and Australia, but the Attorney-General refuses to say whether Duggan’s charges are crimes in Australia—if the AG can’t even claim dual criminality, on what grounds did he approve Duggan’s arrest and harsh treatment?
• An indictment cobbled together by the Trump administration in 2017, when anti-China hawks Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, and Peter Navarro were ramping up attacks on China, accuses Duggan of training Chinese military pilots at a training school in South Africa between 2010 and 2012, but he vehemently denies they were military pilots, and nobody else associated with that school has been charged.
• Even if they were military pilots, the official attitudes of the US and Australian governments towards China in 2010-12 were very different than today—even as recently as 2019 Australia conducted joint military exercises with China!
• UK Air Chief Marshal Wigston acknowledged in 1 February 2023 testimony to the UK House of Commons Defence Committee that such foreign pilot training had been “going on for many years and it goes back to a period when we took a different approach to China. … So I can understand why those people … would have felt that it was a reasonable thing to do.”
• The 18 October 2022 Washington Post admitted most retired US military personnel ignore the law Duggan is accused of breaching, without consequences: “There is no criminal penalty for violating the law. Enforcement is almost nonexistent.”

Robert Barwick said: “The ACP has documented these and more sinister aspects of Duggan’s case in our reports.

“We expose a coordinated Five Eyes operation to display Duggan’s head on a pike as a pretext for ‘national security’ crackdowns to consolidate the AUKUS alliance.

“Why is Australia so subservient to this agenda of blatantly fabricating a China ‘threat’ to provoke war, when it is clearly not in our national interests, considering that unlike the UK and USA we live in the region and China is our regional neighbour as well as our biggest trading partner?

“Our government’s subservience is the reason Prime Minister Albanese cannot convince the UK and USA to free Assange; it’s the reason we are preparing to bankrupt ourselves by handing over $368 billion for UK and US nuclear submarines; and it’s the reason our Attorney-General is assisting the US government in making an example of this brave former US Marine pilot, now Australian citizen with a wife and family in Orange.

“Australians should be outraged, and demand Dan Duggan be freed to return to his family.”

What you can do

Visit the FreeDanDuggan Campaign website to sign the petition and support the family’s legal fight.

Contact your local MP, especially Labor MPs, and demand to know why they are rolling over for the US government to make an example of an Australian citizen.