Geithner's father had supervised the Indonesia work of Obama's mother during the 1980s, and Geithner himself began his career at Kissinger Associates, the consultancy for longtime Rockefeller family retainer Henry Kissinger, a former secretary of state.
From there, Geithner has gone on to oversee much of the nation's financial well-being, including collection of income taxes from the rest of us.
The Siegelman Case
Also this month, Florida federal judge Richard Hinkle continued Siegelman's decade-long ordeal by postponing a ruling on whether the former governor's trial judge, Mark Fuller, should have recused himself because of bias or the appearance of bias. Fuller, Alabama's chief judge for the middle district, helped the Bush Justice Department railroad the former governor and Scrushy into prison, as shown by JIP and others.
The DOJ claims not one reasonable person in the nation would think Fuller might be biased, a preposterous claim.
For one, Alabama legal commentator Roger Shuler criticized Fuller this week, as others have many times. "The record in the Siegelman case is filled with grounds that require Fuller's recusal," he wrote. "In fact, the law requires Fuller to make that ruling on his own. But he shuffled it off to another judge."
In a rare photo, Fuller is portrayed above in a portrait that he requested in his chambers by Phil Fleming a few minutes after the Siegelman/Scrushy returned its verdict in 2006.
My organization JIP published an exposà © of Fuller in May 2009, "Siegelman Deserves New Trial Because of Judge's "Grudge', Evidence Shows"...$300 Million in Bush Military Contracts Awarded to Judge's Private Company." The "grudge" is from a separate case stemming from the judge's long-secret, controlling ownership of Doss Aviation, Inc., a closely held company that refuels Air Force planes and trains Air Force pilots.
As regular OpEd News readers know, this is one of the many irregularities that surfaced only after courageous Alabama whistleblowers stepped forward to document how the Bush DOJ framed Siegelman and Scrushy on corruption charges in 2006. Alabama attorney Dana Jill Simpson, for example, swore in 2007 that she'd been on a planning call in 2002 whereby fellow Republicans described how they'd remove the governor from politics by an indictment.
After Simpson's revelations about the 2002 call and Doss ownership the judge issued a ruling clearing himself from bias. He then sentenced the defendants to seven-year terms, and had them hauled from court in shackles to begin serving their terms immediately without the appeal bonds normal for white-collar defendants. Siegelman went to solitary cconfinement. Meanwhile, one of his attorneys helped win a civil court fraud case against Scrushy.
The case has become an international human rights disgrace, with paramilitary overtones. The Bush DOJ created a special anti-Siegelman task force headquartered at Maxwell-Gunter Air Force base, where a trial team led by an Air Force reserve colonel pressured witnesses with threats verging on blackmail. Threats, never known to have been investigated despite 2009 requests by both judicial and congressional leaders, including alleged exposure of a witness's homosexual partners if he didn't provide trial testimony prosecutors that liked.
Prosecutors operated under the overall supervision of Washington's Bush DOJ headquarters and Alabama's middle district U.S. attorney Leura Canary, whose husband, led the campaign for Siegelman's gubernatorial rival Bob Riley. Remarkably, Obama has continued the Bush appointee in office.
As partial explanation for the extra-legal forces at work, JIP has tied the Siegelman prosecution to the projected $40 billion Air Force tanker refueling contract in a bidding war between Boeing and EADS North America, a subsidiary of the European manufacturers of Airbus planes. EADS has lined up support from Alabama's powerful Republican congressional delegation by promising to build its parts assembly plant in Mobile.
The contract has been delayed for years. Earlier this year, Alabama Sen. Dick Shelby (R) put a hold on all Obama administration nominations to extract an Obama administration promise for fair consideration for EADS, a request made also by top European leaders seeking U.S. taxpayer funding for jobs and raw materials involved in the contracts. This month, the DoD disclosed that it has mistakenly distributed confidential bid data to unauthorized recipients, thereby requiring yet another postponement of the award as described by Alabama's invaluable public interest commentator Shuler, a frequent contributor of columns to OpEd News.
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