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

Foreign Minister Alexander Downer even dared to claim that Hicks be grateful for not having a longer spell in US captivity. "He would have been there for years if it hadn't been for our intervention."

The subsequent Plea Agreement reached in March 2007, under which Hicks pleaded guilty for "providing material support for terrorism", saw him receive a seven-year sentence, most of it suspended. The remaining seven months of the sentence was served in Australia, which the UN Human Rights Committee held to be a "disproportionate restriction of the right to liberty" in violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The HRC also noted that Hicks "had no other choice than to accept the Plea Agreement that was put to him" were he to escape the human rights violations he faced in Camp X-Ray.

On February 18, 2015, the United States Court of Military Commission Review set aside Hicks' guilty plea and sentence. The judges noted that the charge of providing material support for terrorism should be vacated, given the Supreme Court ruling in 2014 that being tried for such an offence by a military commission was an "ex post facto violation".

To crown this appalling resume of achievements is the Australian government's grossly feeble response to Julian Assange's continued persecution at the hands of the US Department of Justice in the United Kingdom. Facing a preposterously broad application of the Extradition Act of 1917, thereby imperilling national security journalism, Australian calls to drop the case have been weak and lukewarm at best. The trend was set by Labor Prime Minister Julia Gillard, whose response to Cablegate in 2010 was to presume Assange was guilty for having breached some regulation, despite failing to identify a single law to that effect.

Given this inglorious record, the Duggan case has an all too familiar feel to it. The training of Chinese pilots by veteran personnel from a Western country would hardly have raised a murmur when relations between Washington and Beijing were less acrimonious. Hicks also found himself in the historical crosshairs, foolishly wishing to throw in his lot with forces that were once the anti-communist darlings of the US intelligence community.

The question here is what Australian citizens can do when providing services for foreign countries. Serving in ultra-nationalist Ukrainian regiments, or moonlighting in the Israeli Defence Force, is unlikely to land you in trouble. But proffering aeronautical expertise in a private capacity while earning some cash on the side? How frightful.

If the fevered assessments from the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation are anything to go by, the only thing missing in Duggan's extradition is the welcome card for the US DOJ. ASIO Chief Mike Burgess, in his annual threat assessment , was eager to justify his agency's bloated budget. "More hostile foreign intelligence services, more spies, more targeting, more harm, more ASIO investigations, more ASIO disruptions. From where I sit, it feels like hand-to-hand combat."

Burgess shows a striking inability to understand why much of this is overegging paranoia. Academics, business figures and bureaucrats, in suggesting he ease up on ASIO's foreign interference and espionage operations, could only offer him "flimsy" justifications, such as "All countries spy on each other" and "We were going to make the information public anyway".

Facing such a jaundiced worldview, Duggan's future is bleak. And now that Australia has willingly committed itself to Armageddon in lock-step with US forces in any conflict with the PRC, Canberra is doing everything it can to be an efficient detainer for its enormous and not always considerate friend.