And I think you're beginning to see a very clear change, as a matter of fact, after that letter you're beginning to see a number of people on the Committee who are saying, Well, we think it was wrong to exclude the issue of chemicals from our conclusion, and in fact, as you know, in their draft release of several months ago, they were very critical of the DOD in terms of how they looked at the role that chemicals may have played. Not to mention that the GAO, the General Accounting Office, thought that if present trends continued there's no reason to believe that the DOD or the VA are going to discover the cause of the problem or an effective treatment. So it's not just members of Congress, but basically, I think that the initial recognition, conclusion of the PAC, was dead wrong, and what I wanted to show is that we have many people in the United States Congress who believe that chemicals played a role and that has got to be considered. Well, panels, you know when you get involved in politics, politics is a funny thing. Some of us actually believe that we come closer to representing the interests of people who are hurting than committees that are appointed by other people.
Nobody is immune to political pressure and people are appointed for various reasons.
I think what you are seeing now is a change in the conclusions that members of the Presidential Advisory Committee have come up with. And while you can say, correctly, that the Presidential Advisory Committee is independent from the DOD and the VA, there's no question but that they got an enormous amount of the information from the VA and the DOD and that they have a working relationship with them. I think in this whole issue, the Congress in fact, has played a reasonable role in trying to raise the right issues and demanding that the VA and the DOD do the right thing. It's your realm to raise issues and represent the veterans in your constituents. But the causation issue, the cause and effect of Gulf War illness is an empirical question that scientists are the ones qualified to answer and it's not as if, I think, the PAC would say if they were sitting here, it's not as if they didn't consider depleted uranium, pb pills, biological weapons, pesticides, insecticide, chemical weapons, in their report.