Doing Washington's bidding: Australia's treatment of Daniel Duggan

The increasingly shabby treatment of former US marine Daniel Edmund Duggan by Australian authorities in the service of their US masters has again shown that the Australian passport is not quite worth the material it's printed on.

In January this year, Sydney's Downing Centre Local Court heard that Australian Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus accepted a request from the US before Christmas to extradite Duggan. Duggan holds Australian citizenship, but Canberra has often regarded this as irrelevant when it comes to the US-Australian alliance.

In a 2017 indictment unsealed on December 9, Duggan is accused by prosecutors of using his expertise to train Chinese fighter pilots to land on aircraft carriers along with eight co-conspirators working at a South African flight school. It is also alleged that the US State Department warned him to apply for written authorisation to train a foreign air force in 2008, which is a requirement of the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). The allegation here is that he went ahead without securing authorisation, thereby breaching trafficking and arms control laws between 2009 and 2012.

Duggan has been held since October. In the finest traditions of Australian justice, he is being confined in conditions that suggest presumed guilt. His lawyer, Dennis Miralis, has stated at various points with some exasperation that his client is "presumed innocent under US law". Duggan's wife, Saffrine, insists that her husband is "a victim of the United States government's political dispute with China."

This presumption has also been sorely tested by Duggan's detention in a two-by-four-metre cell at the Silverwater jail, which also houses convicted terrorists. Miralis can only assume that the New South Wales Department of Directions has been all too willing to follow instructions delivered from on high.

Earlier this month lawyers for Duggan made a submission to the UN Human Rights Committee challenging these conditions. Their submission argues that the authorities have failed to protect Duggan from "inhumane and degrading" treatment, failed to segregate him from convicted inmates, violated his right to adequate facilities to enable him to prepare his legal defence, and denied his right to confidential communications.

The submission also references the assessment of a clinical psychologist who visited Duggan in the Silverwater prison. "The psychologist described Mr Duggan's conditions as 'extreme' and 'inhumane'. He advised that Mr Duggan was at risk of a major depressive disorder." Another condition causing him even further discomfort is benign prostatic hyperplasia.

Regarded as nothing more than contingent paperwork, citizenship is feeble in prosecutions of Australians by other allied countries. To the contrary, Canberra has often aided and abetted the undermining of citizens' rights with a snotty "good riddance" attitude, glad to be rid of supposedly bad apples in the cart.

During the poorly conceived "War on Terror", a tellingly ghastly response to the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, Australian citizens found themselves captured, rendered and left to decay in detention. Such names should forever be taught in schools. They include the Egyptian-Australian national Mamdouh Habib, and David Hicks.

Habib's arrest in October 2001 in Pakistan and subsequent detention for three years on suspicion of having prior knowledge of the September 11 terrorist attacks, was a fantasy encouraged by both US and Australian personnel. Despite the US expressing the view in January 2005 that it would not lay charges against Habib, the Australian Attorney-General and Minister for Foreign Affairs were still adamant that Habib had prior knowledge of the attacks, had spent time in Afghanistan, and trained with al-Qaida.

Hicks was sent to the purgatory of Guantánamo Bay in January 2002 after being captured in Afghanistan by forces of the Northern Alliance. He then became something of a judicial guinea pig, the victim of a military commission system initially deemed by the US Supreme Court to be unconstitutional, unfair and illegal.

What was particularly striking here were the instances of premature adjudication and Australian calls that the US authorities do all they could to try and convict Hicks. Prime Minister John Howard worried that Hicks, were he not to face a military commission trial in the US, would escape charges in Australia. He did not "regard that as a satisfactory outcome, given the severity of the allegations that have been made against him."