Australia: US Marine Pilot to Appeal Extradition

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Facts

  • An Australian magistrate ruled that former US Marine pilot Daniel Duggan, who became an Australian citizen in 2012, can be extradited to the US on charges of violating arms control laws for allegedly training Chinese soldiers to land planes on aircraft carriers.1
  • Duggan, who is originally from Boston, Mass., has spent 19 months in a New South Whales maximum-security prison. US prosecutors allege that he was paid AUS$88K ($61K ) over nine installments for training Chinese pilots in 2010 and 2012.2
  • Duggan, whose wife and six kids are also Australian, was arrested in 2022 after returning from China, where he had lived since 2014. After his arrest, the UK government warned its military not to train Chinese soldiers at the South African flying academy where Duggan had worked.3
  • His lawyers claim there's no evidence that the pilots he trained belonged to the military and that he became an Australian citizen in January 2012, before the alleged offenses. Meanwhile, the US claims he didn't renounce his American citizenship until 2016, which he did at the US embassy in Beijing.4
  • Before joining the adventure flight company Top Gun Tasmania, Duggan spent 12 years as a tactical flight instructor in the US army, reaching the rank of major. He immigrated to Australia in 2002.2
  • Duggan now has 15 days to appeal the court decision before Australian Attorney General Mark Dreyfus, who will make the final ruling.1

Sources: 1Reuters.com, 2CBS, 3New York Post and 4South China Morning Post.

Narratives

  • Pro-establishment narrative, as provided by 9Now. With over a decade of service under his belt, Duggan should have known that China uses civilians to gain access to Western military secrets. He also didn't help his case by renouncing his American citizenship and even moved himself and his family to China for some time. Duggan is on his way to face trial in the US because he violated US law.
  • Establishment-critical narrative, as provided by AAPP. Duggan — who spent over a decade serving his country and faced no scrutiny for years while teaching all sorts of people how to fly — suddenly became a criminal when the US, UK, and Australia decided to turn China into an adversary. He has sat in solitary confinement for years because Washington needed a proxy in its new cold war with Beijing.

Predictions