Theodore's World

WASHINGTON — Thieves took sensitive personal information on 26.5 million U.S. veterans, including Social Security numbers and birth dates, after a Veterans Affairs employee improperly brought the material home, the government said Monday.
The information involved mainly those veterans who served and have been discharged since 1975, said VA Secretary Jim Nicholson. Data of veterans discharged before 1975 who submitted claims to the agency may have been included.
Nicholson said there was no evidence the thieves had used the data for identity theft, and an investigation was continuing.
“It’s highly probable that they do not know what they have,” he said in a briefing with reporters. “We have decided that we must exercise an abundance of caution and make sure our veterans are aware of this incident.”
Veterans advocates expressed alarm.
“This was a very serious breach of security for American veterans and their families,” said Bob Wallace, executive director of Veterans of Foreign Wars. “We want the VA to show leadership, management and accountability for this breach.”
Ramona Joyce, spokeswoman for the American Legion, agreed that the theft was a concern. “In the information age, we’re constantly told to protect our information. We would ask no less of the VA,” she said.
Nicholson declined to comment on the specifics of the incident, which involved a midlevel data analyst who had taken the information home to suburban Maryland on a laptop to work on a department project.
The residential community had been a target of a series of burglaries when the employee was victimized earlier this month, according to the FBI in Baltimore. Local law enforcement and the VA inspector general were also investigating.
“I want to emphasize there was no medical records of any veteran and no financial information of any veteran that’s been compromised,” Nicholson said, although he added later that some information on the veterans’ disabilities may have been taken.
Nicholson said he does not know how many of the department’s 235,000 employees go thorough background investigations. He said employees who have access to large volumes of personal data should be required to undergo such checks, but he does not believe the VA employee was involved in the theft.
“We do not suspect at all any ulterior motive,” he said.
The department has come under criticism for shoddy accounting practices and for falling short on the needs of veterans.
Last year, more than 260,000 veterans could not sign up for services because of cost-cutting. Audits also have shown the agency used misleading accounting methods and lacked documentation to prove its claimed savings.
“It is a mystifying and gravely serious concern that a VA data analyst would be permitted to just walk out the VA door with such information,” Illinois Rep. Lane Evans, the top Democrat on the Veterans Affairs Committee, said in a statement signed by other Democrats on the panel.
Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., who is a Vietnam veteran, said he would introduce legislation to require the VA to provide credit reports to the veterans affected by the theft.
“This is no way to treat those who have worn the uniform of our country,” Kerry said. “Someone needs to be fired.”
The VA said it was notifying members of Congress and the individual veterans about the burglary. It has set up a call center at 1-800-FED-INFO and Web site, http://www.firstgov.gov, for veterans who believe their information has been misused.
It also is stepping up its review of procedures on the use of personal data for many of its employees who telecommute as well as others who must sign disclosure forms showing they are aware of federal privacy laws and the consequences if they’re violated.
Deborah Platt Majoras, chair of the Federal Trade Commission, said her task force has reached out to the three major credit bureaus to be alert to possible misuse.
Other places regarding this:
Latest Information on Veterans Affairs Data Security
Wild Thing’s comment………
Is it just me or does it make your skin crawl when Hanoi Kerry’s name is connected in any way to Veterans??!!!!
GRRrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr! I mean it is bad enough to have this kind of thing happen to our Veterans and then to have to see that piece of shits name ( Kerry) in the story about it makes me sick!!!
Here is some information:
You can order a copy of your DD214 online now. It usually will arrive within a week of your request if you fax in your signature. The National Personnel Records Center (NPRC) has provided the following website for veterans to gain access to their DD-214s online:

For- Against- For _ well maybe- NO wait…………………….ugh!

Sen. John Kerry joined most of his Democratic colleagues last week in voting to build a wall along 370 miles of the U.S.-Mexican border.
But he now says that after the wall is built it should be taken down as soon as possible.
“I voted for it,” Kerry acknowledged Friday while speaking to the New England Council breakfast.
But in quotes picked up by the Boston Herald, the Massachusetts Democrat added: “If I were making the long-term decision, I’d announce, you know, hopefully it’s a temporary measure, and we can take it down as soon as we have enough people” to guard the border.
Kerry said beefing up the number of border patrol agents “should be America’s goal, absolutely and positively.” He noted that he’d introduced an amendment to the Senate border bill that would add 3,000 new officers.
“But in the temporary,” he said, “we’ve got to have a comprehensive approach everywhere,” adding that, “in the short term, I think the wall can serve us well.”

Kerry’s 180 has been incarcerated. After all, we all saw that he wants to share with the American people according to his statement on Russert’s program on television in front of the entire nation.
You would think that in view of his opening a law firm back in the 70’s (Kerry & Sragow) -that he would know how to properly execute a form. Apparently when he DID sign the 180, did so just so his biographer was the only one who would receive the information at the Boston Globe.
We understand there are 100 something pages missing from that file.
Retired Rear Admiral George R. Worthington, who served with the Navy SEALS, calls Kerry’s celebrated ribbon-tossing stunt in 1971 a breach of trust. “It didn’t help for him to be making foreign policy when other guys were in combat or the Hanoi Hilton,” says Worthington. “He voted against nearly every weapons increase when he was in the Senate.”
Kerry insists ‘’The truth in its entirety will come out . . . the truth will come out.”
We are still waiting.

We’ve formed a blogburst group and here are the bloggers who are contributing so far. If you want to join the blogroll for Free Kerry’s 180,click to email
Cao and include the url for your blog.

Thank you Cao for all the work you do on this and the blogroll.

* Cao’s Blog

“We have the right to kill 4 million Americans – 2 million of them children – and to exile twice as many and wound and cripple hundreds of thousands…” -Suleiman Abu Gheith, al Qaeda spokesman
Northwest HQ INTEL
May 2006: On Monday, the Toronto Sun reported the theft of hundreds of stolen Afghan passports, noting that they can be used by terrorists to attempt entry into Canada and the U.S. According to published media reports, the blank passports and official Afghan seals were stolen from the Afghan embassy in Belgium on Wednesday, April 26, 2006. Police are concerned the blank documents can be modified by terrorists to pose as refugees, board flights to Canada and sneak into the U.S.
Security officials at U.S. border crossing checkpoints are advised to be on alert for the immediate use of these documents.

by Heidi at Euphoric Reality
Our Open Borders Will Be The Death Of Us Yet
I live in Texas, and sometimes I think people don’t truly grasp the fact that the chaos on our borders is not a border state issue – it threatens them directly, no matter where they live. The fact is that our border chaos is directly linked to our national security. Terrorists already have and continue to illegally cross our border, blending in with illegals from Mexico and Central America, or brazenly crossing over with an armed escort of gang members or even the Mexican military.
Watch this video of an ongoing investigation done by the news team from KGRV TV serving
Harlingen-Weslaco-McAllen -Brownsville, Texas. (Video will open in your media player – it’s a news segment.) It is part of an ongoing series highlighting the culmination of months of investigative research into the flow of terrorists over our borders. Fred Burton, a counter-terrorism expert of Stratfor, was interviewed on camera. He stated that now is the perfect time for terrorists to sneak across the border. Escalating violence and an unprecedented flood of illegals is distracting law enforcement and stretching it thin. Zapata County sheriff, Frederigo Gonzales Jr. says that as for WMDs, it is not a matter of “if”, but “when”.
About one in every 10 caught border jumpers is an Arab. I don’t think I need to point out that if they are sneaking into the country illegally, they fit the profile and are probably terrorists. Unfortunately, we only catch about 25-33% of the flood of illegals, and estimates are that we absorb 3 million illegals (Time Magazine, September 2004 and Bear Stearns July 2005) that do make it through each year. That could mean that about 10% of the illegals that DO make it across are possible terrorists. Do the math: that’s potentially 300,000 terrorists making it into our country free and clear. Let’s get really skeptical and downgrade that so we feel better about it – let’s say only 1% of those that make it through are possible terrorists. That is only 30,000 – per YEAR. Is that OK? Considering it took 18 terrorists to wreak the terror of 9/11, is 300,000 or even 30,000 terrorists OK with you?
If that’s a reasonable risk for you, then consider the percentage of potential terrorists that have already crossed the border and are living among us – sleeper cells in our own neighborhoods. The low estimate of illegals inside our border is 20 million, the high is 29 million. What’s 10% of that figure? Is a few million potential terrorists a reasonable risk?
For some strange reason, the smaller number of 30,000 is almost scarier to me. Maybe it’s just easier to grasp a few thousand insane killers bent on our destruction, instead of an army of millions. Maybe it’s because we can do still something about thousands – IF we act swiftly and ruthlessly – but a few million is an almost insurmountable…and it’s possibly far too late. Fred Burton agrees with that assessment – he said the numbers of terrorists that have been caught is nothing compared to those that have made it through – those numbers are huge.

* Euphoric Reality

(more…)

Reunited: boys saved from slavers (Christian children captured by Muslim slave-traders)
Times Online
A SENIOR member of an Islamic organisation linked to Al-Qaeda is funding his activities through the kidnapping of Christian children who are sold into slavery in Pakistan.
The Sunday Times has established that Gul Khan, a wealthy militant who uses the base of Jamaat-ud Daawa (JUD) near Lahore, is behind a cruel trade in boys aged six to 12.
They are abducted from remote Christian villages in the Punjab and fetch nearly £1,000 each from buyers who consign them to a life of misery in domestic servitude or in the sex trade.
Khan was exposed in a sting organised by American and Pakistani missionaries who decided to save 20 such boys and return them to their homes. Using a secret camera, they filmed him accepting $28,500 (£15,000) from a Pakistani missionary posing as a businessman who said he wanted to set up an operation in which the boys would beg for cash on the streets.
The base was funded by Osama Bin Laden, the Al-Qaeda leader, in the late 1990s and the JUD’s assets were frozen last month by the US Treasury after it was designated a terrorist organisation.
The US State Department declared the JUD a front for another organisation, Lashkar-i-Toiba, a terrorist group banned in Pakistan which joined with Al-Qaeda in an attempt to assassinate President Pervez Musharraf in 2003.
Khan, who regularly stays at the JUD’s base, broke his promise to hand over the 20 boys on receipt of the cash and took the Pakistani missionary’s assistant hostage while he checked that the dollars were genuine.
The boys were eventually freed in a dishevelled and malnourished state after being locked in a room for five months during which they suffered frequent beatings.
Last week I accompanied six of the boys on journeys of up to 15 hours to their homes, where they were greeted with astonishment and jubilation by families who had given them up for dead.
The mother of Akash Aziz, who was kidnapped as he played with his friends after school, was so astonished that she could barely move or speak at first.
The undercover missionaries have demanded the prosecution of Khan and an investigation into his work for the JUD, which claims to have created a “pure Islamic environment” at Muridke.
Hafez Muhamed Sayeed, its leader, was accused of inciting riots in Pakistan this year with speeches denouncing western “depravity” after a Danish newspaper published cartoons of the prophet Muhammad.
Wild Thing’s comment……
The most dangerous threat to the existence of mankind is the dangerous cult of Islam. The entire world should be horrified with the death cult of Islam. But just look at our own country, the USA, and how the left makes excuses for Islamists ie. Gore, Kennedy, the media, celebrities etc. Odd how they must be thinking that the terrorist have selective killing in mind when they simply do not.

Iranian students set up fund dedicated to Israel’s destruction. Encouraged by regime, students call fund ‘symbolic move’ in support of Palestinians
YNet news
Iranian students set up fund dedicated to Israel’s destruction. Encouraged by regime, students call fund ‘symbolic move’ in support of Palestinians.
A group of Iranian students announced Sunday at an event attended by a high-ranking member of the elite Revolutionary Guard that they were setting up a fund to destroy Israel.
Although the initiative’s name – “The Student Fund for Demolishing Israel” – brings to mind President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s call last year to destroy the Jewish state, an organizer said its goal was to support the cash-strapped Palestinian government.
Some 300 students attended the event hosted by a group calling itself the Movement of Justice-seeking Students at the University of Tehran.

“This is a symbolic move to attract public attention to the Palestinian cause at a time when Western countries have halted financial support to the Hamas-led government,” Javad Miri, the group’s spokesman, told The Associated Press.

Miri said the group was collecting money that it will send it to the Hamas-led Palestinian government. “When an elected government is in power in Palestine and Israel is pressuring it, everybody should help the Palestinians.”

The United States and the European Union halted most of their aid to the Palestinian Authority following Hamas’ victory in Palestinian legislative elections in January, requiring that the group renounce violence and recognize Israel.
Popular campaigns to collect money for the Palestinians have been launched in several Arab countries.
‘We are ready to support Palestinians by any means’
A general in the elite Revolutionary Guards, Saeed Ghassemi, struck a militaristic note in his address to the crowd. “Resistance is the only solution for Palestinians,” He said. “If you abandon the sword, that will be the beginning of your end,” he advised Hamas.
But the response to the call for donations was hardly overwhelming. About 10 students dropped money into a box labeled with the fund’s name. They also put stones in the box in a symbolic gesture of solidarity that alluded to the first Palestinian intefadeh, or uprising, when youths pelted Israeli soldiers with rocks.

“I hope it’s the start of popular financial support for the Hamas government,” Einollah Zarrinjoo, 21, a male student of philosophy said.

Mahin Rezai, 20, a female Persian literature student said, “We are ready to support Palestinians by any means. Silence could make the situation worse.”

In April, Iran said it would give the Palestinian Authority USD 50 million in aid. Last year, Ahmadinejad said the Holocaust was a myth and that Israel should be wiped out. Apparently taking a cue from the president, the Iranian Foreign Ministry announced plans to hold a conference to examine evidence of the Holocaust.
The hard-line Association of Muslim Journalists has also proposed a similar event. Dates have not been set for either.
Iran is currently home to about 25,000 Jews who are represented by a Jewish lawmaker in parliament. About 75,000 left the country after the 1979 Islamic revolution.
Wild Thing’s comment……..

On Iran’s side, drop a coin in the turban; on Israel’s, beaucoup nukes, with the brains to put where sent.

Thank you to Linda at Something….and Half of Something for the Video you see above.

Iran Prepares ‘Judgment Day’ Attack Plan
by Kenneth R. Timmerman
The Islamic Republic of Iran is planning to use as many as eight different terrorist groups to launch attacks against the United States and its allies in the region should the United States launch military strikes against its nuclear facilities, a London-based newspaper reported.
Another Iranian intelligence source tells NewsMax that Iran plans suicide strikes in the United States, and may seek to hold mass numbers of Americans hostage.
Ali Reza Nourizadeh’s column in Al Sharq al Awsat, a London newspaper, citing a “senior source” in the office of Iranian joint chief of staff Hassan Firouzabadi, noted that “eight fundamentalist Islamist organizations have received large sums of money in the last month from the Iranian intelligence services” as part of the plan.
The Revolutionary Guards’ “al Qods” Jerusalem Force will coordinate the plan, codenamed “al Qiyamah, the Islamic word for Judgment Day,” Al Sharq al Awsat reported.
The al Qods force is the fourth branch of the Revolutionary Guards Corps, after its ground, naval and air forces. The al Qods trains foreign terrorist organizations, both in Iran and in camps in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, the Sudan and elsewhere.
Counterterrorism officials in France, Germany and Austria have identified the al Qods force as the “strike force” used by Iran to assassinate Iranian dissidents living overseas. The U.S. military has captured al Qods force officers in Iraq, where they have delivered special explosives used in roadside bombs by terrorists against U.S. forces and against Iraqi civilians.
Over the last four months, leaders of the eight foreign terrorist groups have made public visits to Iran, where they have met with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and other leaders.
According to the London-based daily, the foreign visitors also met secretly with Iranian intelligence minister Gholahossein Mohseni Ezhei and top aides, who asked them if they were prepared to aid Iran in the event of a U.S. or Israeli attack.
The paper’s source said that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards force had opened training camps in Iran for fighters of the Shiite Muslim “Mahdi Army” of Iraq, the militia controlled by firebrand Shiite cleric Moqtada al Sadr, and had “increased its financial assistance” to al Sadr to “more than $20 million” per month.
Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Lebanon’s Hezbollah are also receiving large sums of money and fresh weapons, the source said.
Eighty members of Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement received terrorist training last year in launching suicide attacks using hang-gliders and small submersibles designed to deliver commando divers or suicide attackers.
Wild Thing’s comment…….
I wonder if Murtha and the rest of the lefties give a hoot about this. Probably not, it is just news of their friends discussing how to take Americans hostage and kill us. They have other things to think about like how to trash our troops and how to destroy America from within.

A Day In The Life Of…:
Your alarm goes off, you hit the snooze and sleep for another 10 minutes.
He stays up for days on end.
You take a warm shower to help you wake up.
He goes days or weeks without running water.
You complain of a “headache”, and call in sick.
He gets shot at, as others are hit, and keeps moving forward.
You put on your anti war/don’t support the troops shirt, and go meet up with your friends.
He still fights for your right to wear that shirt.
You make sure you’re cell phone is in your pocket.
He clutches the cross hanging on his chain next to his dog tags.
You talk trash on your “buddies” that aren’t with you.
He knows he may not see some of his buddies again.
You walk down the beach, staring at all the pretty girls.
He walks the streets, searching for insurgents and terrorists.
You complain about how hot it is.
He wears his heavy gear, not daring to take off his helmet to wipe his brow.
You go out to lunch, and complain because the restaurant got your order wrong.
He does not get to eat today.
Your maid makes your bed and washes your clothes.
He wears the same things for months, but makes sure his weapons are clean.
You go to the mall and get your hair redone.
He doesn’t have time to brush his teeth today.
You are angry because your class ran 5 minutes over.
He is told he will be held an extra 2 months.
You call your girlfriend and set a date for that night.
He waits for the mail to see if there is a letter from home.
You hug and kiss your girlfriend, like you do everyday.
He holds his letter close and smells his love’s perfume.
You roll your eyes as a baby cries.
He gets a letter with pictures of his new child, and wonders if they’ll ever meet.
You criticize your government, and say that war never solves anything.
He sees the innocent tortured and killed by their own government and remembers why he is fighting.
You hear the jokes about the war, and make fun of the men like hi
He hears the gun fire and bombs.
You see only what the media wants you to see.
He sees the bodies lying around him.
You are asked to go to the store by your parents. You don’t.
He does what he is told.
You stay at home and watch TV.
He takes whatever time he is given to call and write home, sleep, and eat.
You crawl into your bed, with down pillows, and try to get comfortable.
He crawls under a tank for shade and a 5 minute nap, only to be woken by gun fire.
You sit there and judge him, saying the world is a worse place because of men like him.
If only there were more men like him



Thank you to Mark a friend of mine that knows very well what it means to walk the walk.