Dennis Miralis, Duggan’s lawyer, filed a motion in a Sydney court on Tuesday for his hearing on extradition to the United States to be delayed until November 24. Duggan, 54, was arrested near his home in New South Wales in October based on an indictment in a US court from 2016 that was only unsealed late last year.
According to the US government, Duggan conspired with others to provide training for Chinese military pilots without the proper license, for which he received $61,000 between 2010 and 2012.
Lt. Allen Karlson, a student pilot assigned to the “Tigers” of Training Squadron Nine (VT-9), with instructor Cdr. Joe Kerstiens (USNR) sits “shotgun”(rear seat) evaluating Lt. Allen Karlson before his solo formation training. 1st Lt. Tim Miller flies his T-2C Buckeye down to cross under the lead, on his first formation solo, during a formation training mission over Key West, Fla.
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Duggan served in the US Marine Corps for 12 years before emigrating to Australia in 2002 and giving up his US citizenship in 2012.
It is alleged he trained Chinese pilots on a leased T-2 Buckeye, an obsolete training aircraft first adopted by the US Department of the Navy in 1959 and retired in 2008, when the Navy and Marine Corps adopted the T-45 Goshawk trainer jet. The Buckeye was used to acquaint future fighter pilots with flying a jet aircraft.
Duggan has characterized his arrest as a political game, saying he has been caught in the growing US-China rivalry.
“This is a signal, signal sending. It has nothing to do with me personally,” Duggan told Australian media on Monday from a maximum-security prison. “It’s more to do with the signal that they want to send in a geopolitical sense.”
A former Pentagon analyst, retired US Air Force Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, told Sputnik much the same, noting the facts of the case don’t indicate a crime has happened, or that any regulations were broken.
“This makes me wonder if this is just part of general anti-China hysteria, or Biden pandering to the neocons in DC,” she told Sputnik.
“It is part of a larger trend,” Kwiatkowski asserted. “It also provides a face and name that will be consumed by the American public in a way that is possibly more powerful than similar anti-China agitation as we have seen with Huawei and TikTok.”
“As an American, I see this as anti-China pandering in order to sell the China threat, and demand more military funding and higher Pentagon budgets,” she said. “It doesn’t seem to be a strong security case, but it serves the purpose of getting Americans to worry about the Chinese military and to communicate to them that working with China is frowned upon by the US and its most loyal lackeys, in this case, Australia.”
“These are western aircraft, and it makes sense to utilize experienced native language speaking pilots to assist with the training of these various aircraft,” she further noted. “Globalization is a driver, and civil aviation is global in nature.”