the Hum

According to Bush anyone can now make their own laws if they can get to the top of the heap as President. Take the current laws that Bush has been changing since he was in office as an example:

Torture: The Army’s field manual specifically prohibits waterboarding as torture, and under the Geneva convention torture is prohibited. The House of Representatives this week approved a bill that would outlaw its use by the CIA. The bill’s fate is unclear in the Senate and President Bush has threatened to veto it if it is passed.

Why would our Senate need to vote in a bill that establishes an already in effect agreed upon Convention? Perhaps to send a message to the President that he is violating a law? Meanwhile Bush has made his own laws saying that if the President approves of it, waterboarding, and torture are allowed.

Phone Taps: Bush belives that he can ignore wiretap laws and go ahead and spy upon all of us, for whatever reason, just in case we might be involved in terrorist acts. Usually you need to go to the Court and have them look at the evidence and then begin the wiretapping. But in this case, no more.

So many laws and so called “signing statements” have been in the news lately that it’s baffeling for most people to understand, and therefore easy to spin, but the bottom line is that the country has laws for a reason and Bush considers executive power over all of them. This is akin to the Nixon years when Nixon and his team of men beleived that erasing tapes covering up a robbery was okay. Well, it turns out that this wasn’t so.

Yes we know there is a move to impeach Bush and it hasn’t really gotten much steam. Time to take another look.

The United States set the pace for one country entering another country, uninvited, with the mission of eradicating terrorism when we stepped into IRAQ after the September 11 bombing of the World Trade Center. Certainly at that time in the minds of some people it was a mission making sense, but in the overall it was a ticket to do whatever one country wanted to another country without a direct provocation. Who really knows if the people who attacked the WTC were from IRAQ and to Bush, did it matter?

Now come to present day where Turkey where President Abdullah Gul said: “Iraq continues to harbor terrorists and Turkey has the right to eliminate the terrorists. Parliament has given the authorization for this.”

Does this mean that Turkey’s parliment could have given them the authority to enter into ANY country? Where does this so-called authority end?

Nevertheless, it has happened. We set the example and now there are over 100,000 Turkish troops at the Northern border of IRAQ  and nothing to stop their own war on terror to go inside of IRAQ and engage with the rebel Kurds. About 3,000 PKK rebels, including its leaders, are believed to be based in camps in the mountainous region of northern Iraq.

The US has stated that this type of engagement could undermine the IRAQ government in Baghdad. Meanwhile, under investigation is where the PKK has found their weapons as it appears that the Blackwater group may have had something to do with them receiving the weapons. It’s all under investigation.

So where does it end? or does it. Although the PKK are officially considered a terrorist organization by both the US and the UN, does it mean that any country can enter the IRAQ territory and take it upon themselves to do whatever it takes to eradicate them? Can China enter the region as well, North Korea, Iran? and of course, what does that do to stabilize or de-stabilize the region where US forces are based?

Yes, we have put ourselves in the big region of hotbeds. Fighting the grand fight on planet earth. We the eradicators of terrorists all over the world.

Meanwhile Iraqi President Jalal Talabani urged the PKK, to stop their attacks amid fears a Turkish incursion would destabilize the relatively peaceful autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq.  “We have appealed to the PKK to desist fighting and to transform themselves from military organizations into civilian and political ones,” Talabani said. “But if they insist on the continuation of fighting, they should leave Kurdistan, Iraq, and not create problems here.”

Where should they go? Can we name a new place and give territory to them say, in the uninhabitable and mountainous regions of someplace like maybe, Northern Iraq, where no one else wants to live?

I fail to see the point of House Resolution 106 for Armenians. Is it that we just want to acknowledge history? If so, do we have to do it now while the entire world is embroiled in a war?

This is a hot bed of issues that simply don’t need to be addressed right now. I fail to see the use of it. Everyone with half a brain and knowledge of the incident know that there was a genocide, and there was a massacre of Ottoman Muslims during the Armenian uprising too. Let’s face it, the area is a big mess showing the Religious zealots are alive and well and religious imposition of thought continues from the past to the present day. Everything here in the name of God or Allah, whichever your preference.

So now we have a war, one that we were lied to about. We are there, and acknowledging this prior bad deed is not going to change anything, but could make things worse. I hate to agree with Bush on this one, but I do.

I have a diatribe of conversation in my mind about Armenians. The ones I know are just as volatile as the region around Iraq. I’m wondering if it is a genetic thing with all folks in the region. Raised with strong convictions, whether it be Allah or God and indoctrinated with pride from a young age, the argument is never solved.

Therein lies the problem. Armenians believe in God and Muslims believe in Allah, and the battle began, just as it is today where hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi’s are being killed during the battle of Iraq. Entire populations in the middle east are wiped out systematically by well meaning people who are killing in the name of their Gods, trying to secure a place in heaven.

It’s too sad.

Even if the genocide existed, as it did, forcing a bill in the house to acknowledge it today is a bad idea. It’s like throwing salt in the wounds of the middle east.

Leading the charge for the resolution are grass-roots groups such as the Armenian Assembly of America, with 10,000 members, a budget of $3.6 million last year. This vast fortune of money spent to “acknowledge the genocide” makes me suspicious of the nature of this resolution. Is it going to lead to reparations for Armenians?

One Armenian blog suggested that reparations be in the form of land and a port to the sea. I find this one ridiculous at this point as displacing now hundreds of thousands of Turks to give the land back to Armenians is going to be unfair to modern Turks who had nothing to do with the genocide. Are they all culpable for past deeds just solely based on their heritage, because if that’s the case, I guess I too will be moving to Armenia and owning a bit of that land. If it hadn’t been for the genocide, I would have been a rich Armenian girl today growing olive trees and making pakalava in my homeland. But instead I’m stuck here in the grand old US of A typing up a blog and listening to my Armenian relatives screech at the top of their lungs about how unfair it is that Bush won’t let House Resolution 106 pass during a horrible and ugly war in Iraq.

I say let the war end, and then let’s talk about reparations, and if I’m not going to get a sum of money in settlement, then what good is land in Turkey going to do for those of us who were displaced all the way to America?