Daniel Duggan
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Daniel Duggan is a former US Marine pilot and naturalised Australian citizen whose extradition to the United States, sought over flight training he is alleged to have provided in China years before, John Kiriakou has argued against publicly and in a sworn affidavit.

The affidavit

Kiriakou's involvement originated in a series of articles he wrote for Consortium News in 2022 and 2023 on the effects of solitary confinement on American prisoners. He is careful about his own standing in that comparison: he served nine days in solitary in total, far less than most, "and I needed to lose the weight anyway at the time. I joked, but the truth is solitary confinement is used in the United States unlike in any other country in the world."

The affidavit sets out the history, the invention of the practice at Eastern State Penitentiary in 1829, and then the modern record. The United Nations has declared the American use of solitary confinement a form of torture and urged member states to cap it at fifteen days; "here in the United States, we've had people in solitary confinement for as long as 44 years."

The Anthony Gay case

Among the four, five or six cases Kiriakou set out in the affidavit, the one he gives at length is Anthony Gay, a severely mentally ill prisoner placed in solitary immediately after conviction rather than in a hospital where his schizophrenia could have been treated. He was held in a six-by-ten-foot cell twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

What followed, in Kiriakou's account, was paranoia and then self-mutilation: he stabbed himself in the eye with a razor blade, cut off pieces of his own flesh and ate them, cut out one of his testicles and hung it on his cell doorknob, and stitched his scrotum closed with a zipper taken from his trousers, "he didn't even realise what he was doing."

Each act added time. A seven-year sentence became ninety-seven years, of which he served two decades in solitary. The original offence, in 1993: stealing a one-dollar bill from a restaurant tip jar.

What Kiriakou says would happen to Duggan

The conclusion of the affidavit is a prediction. As a high-profile prisoner, Duggan would be placed either in solitary confinement or in a communications management unit, "which is akin to solitary confinement, where the prisoner is completely cut off from the outside world", and, "unless he's stronger than anybody else that I've ever encountered in my life," it would have the same effect on him that it has had on everyone else.

'Everybody who worked at the flight school, or nobody'

Kiriakou's legal objection has two parts. The first is intent, which he says American law has largely discounted: "Did he intend to violate the law? Obviously not. He likely didn't even know there was a law that governed this kind of thing. And even if he did, he wasn't an American citizen."

The second is selectivity. If the United States were genuinely trying to stop the training of undercover Chinese intelligence officers, "they would have asked the Australians to arrest everybody who worked at the flight school, everybody who was training foreign nationals to use these planes, or nobody. But to arrest and then demand the extradition of just Dan Duggan, that just stinks of politics."

He also endorses the argument that ended the Julian Assange extradition as the strongest available here, that a defendant barred from constitutional protection by nationality alone cannot receive equality before the law.

His verdict on the Australian government's conduct is blunt: "the Australians have been so weak in the face of US demands, so willing to roll over, that this man has been imprisoned now for years", three of them, without being charged with a crime in Australia.

The Australian arsonist at Loretto

Kiriakou's answer to the flight-risk justification for holding Duggan in solitary is a comparison from his own sentence. One of his cellmates at FCI Loretto was an Australian national, violent, and a convicted arsonist. The man had shouted at the Department of Motor Vehicles in Buffalo, New York that he would come back and burn the place to the ground "even if people are in it." He came back and burned it to the ground.

He fled to Australia; the Australians arrested him at the request of the United States. "He was never held in solitary confinement. He was finally extradited to the US where he was placed in a low security prison with me. And then he just quietly did his five years and went home."

On the flight-risk claim itself: "Ridiculous. They could have put a bracelet around his ankle, of course... I think it's all for show."

'An American jury would convict a bologna sandwich'

Kiriakou says he has followed the case closely and met Duggan's American attorneys in Washington a number of times, as well as speaking to his Australian legal team. They believe they have a very strong case.

His view is that this does not matter, and he puts his own case and Assange's in the same category: "you might have a strong case, but an American jury would convict a bologna sandwich, as the old saying goes. And you're free to appeal, but you have to appeal post-conviction", meaning the sentence is served while the appeal proceeds. "This is a no-win situation. So it has to be nipped in the bud."

Hence the conclusion: "if he is extradited to the US, he's lost."

The family consequence

The penalty Kiriakou says is least discussed is not the sentence. A conviction, or a plea to a lesser charge, which would still be a felony, would bar Duggan from visiting the United States for twenty-five years. His eight brothers and sisters and his parents all live there, and his parents are elderly and will not travel to Australia. "He would literally never get to see them again unless they visited him in Australia."

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Solitary confinement
- Eastern State Penitentiary
- Julian Assange
- Communications management unit
