On Veterans Day, in honor of all the brave American’s who have selflessly defended our country, deployed U.S. servicemen and women were able to call their loved ones back home at no cost, thanks to financial services provider USAA.

USAA teamed up with VFW to provide more than 70,000 connections to the United States from abroad, totaling nearly 1 million minutes of free talk time through the VFW Operation Uplink™ program. In addition, USAA’s generous sponsorship includes the purchase and distribution of more than 3,000 international calling cards to military chaplains overseas.  

“At USAA, we’re in direct contact with thousands of military members every day, and we hear firsthand the family and household challenges they face. It’s our privilege to support the VFW’s Operation Uplink, which gives them an opportunity to hear their loved ones’ voices, helping ease the burden of separation that military service often requires,” said retired Rear Adm. John Townes, USAA vice president of military affairs. “As we expand our business to serve many more military veterans, we look forward to additional opportunities to work with the VFW to help those who serve our nation as well as those who have served.”

................................................................................USAA, founded by military officers in 1922, recently expanded its eligibility to include all honorably discharged veterans – officer and enlisted – from all branches of the U.S. Armed Services, regardless of years of service. USAA offers banking, investment, insurance and financial planning products and services to more than seven million members of the military and their families.

First Lt. Philip Dudley, a soldier stationed in Baghdad, Iraq said of the Veterans Day Free Call Day, “I want to thank you for your support of service members.  Today my team was able to place free calls from Baghdad to our families in the states.  Being on a very small base means calls can get expensive.  Having the opportunity to make free calls to our loved ones meant the world to my team and I.  Thank you very much for that opportunity.  Your support of veterans and deployed soldiers is always greatly appreciated by those who have served, those who are serving and those who have stood by us through it all.  Thank you.”

Chaplain (Capt.) Pat Opp at Forward Operating Base Leatherneck, Afghanistan is one of many deployed chaplains to receive the free phone cards made possible by USAA.

“Thank you for your generosity for our Joes. That is just great!  I will serve them out to troops who need them and do my best to protect them.  As a chaplain, I do my best to not only check on morale but also stimulate it in a positive way.  Phone cards certainly help!”

VFW Operation Uplink™ “Free Call Days,” launched in 2006, have provided more than 3 million free connections between deployed service members and their loved ones in the United States.

By DANIEL HENNINGER

The Wall Street Journal

If it accomplished nothing else, the Obama administration's announcement last Friday to try 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in lower Manhattan blew the Nidal Hasan murders out of the news. The KSM fiasco deserves all the attention it gets. What Hasan represents, however, is a more immediate concern.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is an old-school jihadi. They sit in far-off redoubts, assembling terror teams of foreign nationals who now must figure out how to get themselves and their plot inside the U.S. Not impossible, but harder than before 9/11.

Hasan is new school. He is what's known as a homegrown terrorist. Virtually all the Islamic terrorist plots thwarted here in recent years were homegrown, not designed from afar by a KSM.

Najibullah Zazi, the Colorado airport-shuttle driver arrested in New York this September and charged with conspiring to detonate bombs, came to the U.S. in 1999.

The Fort Dix Six, convicted in December of conspiring to attack U.S. military personnel, were mainly ethnic Albanians whose family came to New Jersey in the 1980s.

Zakaria Amara, the leader of the Toronto 18, who were planning to blow up skyscrapers in Canada, was born in a Toronto suburb.

In testimony to Congress in September, the director of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center, Mike Leiter, said the Somali terrorist group al-Shabaab includes "dozens of recruits from the Unites States," mostly ethnic Somalis.

How do individuals sitting in Colorado, New Jersey, Toronto or Texas suddenly transform into mass murderers for jihad? Most of the time, they become radicalized by spending vast amounts of time viewing violent Islamic Web sites run from abroad.

Two years ago, Lawrence Sanchez of the New York City Police Department's intelligence division told the Senate Homeland Security Committee that the Internet is "the most significant factor in the radicalization that is occurring in America." Mr. Sanchez described this process as "self-imposed brainwashing."

In New York Times reporter David Rohde's account of his captivity by the Taliban, he wrote that "watching jihadi videos" was his guards' favorite pastime. He describes them as "little more than grimly repetitive snuff films" of executions.

If you sit in the United States and watch this stuff 'round the clock—self-brainwashing—it is fully protected activity. It qualifies as "speech," protected by the panoply of First Amendment law. These protections exist nowhere else in the world.

The biggest controversy surrounding Maj. Hasan is that the Army knew about his radical Islamic sympathies, from the Walter Reed lecture and the monitored emails to the English-speaking, American-born Yemeni imam Anwar Awlaki, whose Facebook page, with a reported 4,800 "friends," is depicted nearby.

The argument is that the Army should have mustered him out of the service and thereby avoided the 13 murders. Really? After kicking him out of the Army, there was no probable cause for authorities to surveil a civilian Nidal Hasan. In time he as easily could have killed 13 Americans in a suburban Texas mall.

Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, as the judge presiding over the 1995 trial of the "blind sheikh," Omar Abdel Rahman, for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, had to instruct the jury that the sheikh's violent, "holy war" sermons at New York mosques were legal, protected activity (he was convicted of conspiracy).

There is a mosque in Manhattan at 96th Street and Lexington Avenue, on whose sidewalk one can hear adherents spouting support for violence against the U.S. That, too, is protected.

A violent ideology is just an ideology, and that is protected speech. It requires acts to put in motion aggressive surveillance, such as wiretapping.

I think the Hasan case shows this is wrong, or at least too dangerous. First Amendment law has never dealt with a widely distributed ideology that has as its raison d'être the mass murder of Americans and destruction of American property.

For now this is the way it is: Future Hasans can get jacked up all day on kill-the-Americans Web sites, and we have to wait until they put in motion a conspiracy like Fort Dix or the Colorado jihadists. Or until they start shooting.

Politics is the only recourse.

This is what the political fight was through the Bush years—fights over the Patriot Act, warrantless wiretaps of conversations between U.S. citizens and foreign suspects, using the SWIFT financial data system to track terrorist transfers (or, with KSM, military tribunals versus civil courts). The argument against these policies was that "our values" require that judges review and approve virtually all such activity.

The problem with this view is that "our values" were already protected to an unprecedented degree. Raising the bar higher is asking too much of the people assigned to catch all these self-radicalizing jihadists.

The Democrats have cast their lot with tighter restrictions. The past six years and a presidential campaign proved that. In the wake of Hasan's 13 dead people, revisiting the limits of our vulnerability has to be on the table in next year's congressional elections, and then a presidential election.

WASHINGTON (November 6, 2009) -- The national commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the U.S. extended his condolences and support today to the families and victims of yesterday's shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas.

"No words can properly convey our condolences to the wounded and families of those murdered," said Thomas J. Tradewell Sr., a Vietnam veteran from Sussex, Wis.

"The entire military family is grieving right now.  I just want them to know they do not grieve alone. Our hearts and prayers are with them."

According to reports, the assailant was identified as Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, 39, an Army psychiatrist assigned to Fort Hood's Darnall Army Medical Center.  He was shot and apprehended by emergency response officials, but not until after he allegedly murdered 12 fellow soldiers and a civilian law enforcement officer, and wounded 30 others. Hasan had been scheduled to deploy overseas.

"Whether he snapped from the stress of going to war or some other reason is for investigators to uncover," said Tradewell.

"Right now the focus has to be on taking care of the victims and families, and in trying to ensure this type tragedy is never repeated within the confines of a U.S. military installation anywhere."

VA hopes to implement a new rule by early 2010 that would make it easier for vets with PTSD to collect disability compensation. VFW says the ruling will help its service officers, too.

VFW November/December Magazine Issue by Tim Dyhouse

Veterans diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) will find it easier to file VA disability claims. They will no longer be required to provide evidence—other than their own testimony—of an event that caused their PTSD.

VA published a proposal in the Aug. 24, 2009, Federal Register noting that it would no longer require “corroboration of a stressor” (the event or experience that caused the PTSD) if a VA psychiatrist or psychologist confirms that a veteran’s stressful experience “adequately supports” a PTSD diagnosis and the vet’s symptoms are related to the stressor.

VFW favors the proposal because it “eases the evidentiary burden” on vets suffering from PTSD and the VFW service officers who help them.

“The change also will make VA’s job a little easier because it won’t have to do as much development to obtain evidence necessary to establish a service-related stressor,” said Gerald T. Manar, deputy director for VFW’s National Veterans Service. “Our service officers won’t have to help VA and the vet find records that prove a stressor. Service officers only need to be sure that VA properly understands the work and experiences vets had while serving.”

But Manar doesn’t necessarily agree with a VA representative’s assessment that the new ruling would “allow us to pay benefits much faster” when VA’s backlog of claims and appeals stands at some 1 million.

“By policy, VA works on its oldest cases first,” said Manar, who worked at VA for 30 years. “As a consequence, anyone seeking service connection of PTSD under these proposed changes will still have to wait until 150,000 cases that have been pending for more than six months are settled. What it may do is allow VA to move those six-month-and-older cases where stressor verification is an issue more quickly.”

Doctors Must Provide Testimony

Before this new ruling, VA claims adjudicators were required to corroborate that non-combat veterans actually experienced a stressor related to hostile military activity. Now, combat support personnel in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars—as well as those of previous wars—who experience combat should find it easier to garner service-connected disability compensation.

“Supply convoys in Vietnam were frequently ambushed,” Manar said. “But because those troops weren’t classified as ‘infantry’ they weren’t eligible for the Combat Infantryman Badge, and it was extremely difficult to prove they were in combat.”

He says VA only recently began accepting unit records showing Vietnam War ambushes or records proving an individual was assigned to a unit that was ambushed. Manar advises vets who were denied a service-connected PTSD claim for lack of evidence to reapply.

“The proposed change eases the evidence burden, but it does not create any kind of presumption,” he said. “If a Vietnam-era veteran claims, for instance, that his stressor was received in combat in Vietnam and military records show he never went to Vietnam, then VA is free to deny the claim in spite of this change in regulations.”

Manar points out that even vets who have received a medal for combat or valor, or were prisoners of war, must still obtain a doctor’s supporting testimony.

“Simply being in combat or imprisonment is not sufficient to ease the evidence burden on a veteran,” he said. “A physician must testify that the stressor which caused the PTSD is the stressor which occurred while in combat or as a POW.”

Though the burden of proof on the veteran has eased, Manar doesn’t believe the new ruling will open the door to “significant” numbers of fraudulent claims.

“Does that mean that some veterans will try to game the system?” he says. “Sure. But they will have to fool a doctor twice into believing that they have PTSD and that it is related to a stressor in service. Can that be done? Yes, but probably fewer times than you would think.”

According to Manar, the main result of the new ruling will be that the collecting of evidence to prove a stressor “largely goes by the boards with this change.” VFW doesn’t believe, he says, that the change will open the floodgates of new or reopened claims for PTSD service connection. Rather, it could allow VA to operate more efficiently.

“The river of claims will grow deeper and flow quicker,” he said. “VA will have to paddle more quickly to move against the current, but, since their boat is lighter thanks to this regulation change, they should be able to make progress upstream.”

According to U.S. officials in the Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office, Russia's military archives are vitally important to the Full Accounting Mission because documents could help to determine the fate of some of the 88,000 missing and unaccounted-for Americans going back to World War II.  Created in 1992, the Joint Commission had been the key to accessing those archives, until a reduction in the size of their government’s executive branch removed the Russian co-chairman.  The U.S. was told it was an oversight, but the oversight has now kept American researchers out of the archives since October 2006.

 Be advised that the following email has been sent out toCitibank's account members.  The email is a phishing attempt and any links contained in it should not be followed.  The link that appears in the email will not take you to the Citibank login page, but a false page

set up to look like the Citibank account log in page.  This is commonly done to either steal your login information or install malware on your

computer without you knowing. 

The bottom line is, no financial institution will send out an email to request anything of you, whether to log into your account or

provide information.  They will always wait for you to contact them or contact you in an official manner. 

Below is a copy of the actual email.  You can see the link presented in the body of the email and then the actual link in brackets (spoofed

address).  As you can see he links do not match.  Whenever receiving an email with a hyperlink, always copy and paste the actual text into the

address bar of your internet browser to make sure it is not spoofed. The link enclosed in brackets has been altered slightly to protect the

curious but left as an

example.   

"Dear Citibank Customer,

A scheduled maintenance on the Citibank Online Banking system has just

been completed. In order to ensure your account (s) held at Citibank

remain active, you will be required to immediately Login to your account

(s). Kindly follow the link below to Citibank Online to continue:

https://online.citibank.com/US/JPS/portal/Index.do

<http://ups-901.steamcom.com/ >

Thank you for choosing Citibank"

IA Manager