frontline: last battle of the gulf war: interviews: Congressman Bernard Sanders

Q: When did you first get involved with this issue?

A: A number of years ago. When we heard from people in the state of Vermont who were over in the Persian Gulf and started reading about some of what was going on and also obviously as a member of the subcommittee which is exploring the problem.

Q: Congressman, when you first got involved with this issue, what kinds of things were you hearing about the veterans? Let's talk first about the VA services.

A: What we were hearing is that people were going to the VA hospitals with problems and basically their problems were given short shrift, they were not taken seriously and either they were believed to have been malingerers and not have any problems at all or at best that the problems were quote-unquote "in their head." And then after awhile as more and more veterans reported illnesses, what we then began to hear was the VA finally saying or the DOD saying, well, yeah, there is a problem, but the problem is all stress-related. Yeah, we acknowledge there is a problem, but it's all stress-related and the truth of the matter is they haven't really moved terribly much from that position despite the fact that there have been a number of studies that have been done by very reputable scientists who have pointed out a very strong link between chemical exposures, peridistigmide bromide, vaccines, and so forth and so on, but that's a line of inquiry that the VA and the DOD have been very reluctant to pursue.

Q: Back then what was it about their attitude that bothered you?

A: What bothered me is that from the very beginning, from the very beginning they either denied that there was a problem, they thought the problem was in the heads of the veterans -- they did not take the problem seriously rather than saying, okay, you have a problem veteran -- or thousands of veterans have a problem, let's try to understand what the cause of that problem is. Let's develop the most effective treatment that we can for you rather than from the very beginning what they were saying is there is no problem and they were saying this not only in terms of the ailments and the symptoms that our veterans were experiencing, when some people said gee, maybe chemical warfare agents are a cause of the problem, are tied into the problem. What their positions was none of our veterans, none of our soldiers were exposed to any chemical warfare agents, none at all.

And then after people on our committee, people in congress, people outside of Congress said, you're wrong, you're wrong, they said, oh, yes, oh, yes, a few hundred soldiers were exposed to chemical warfare agents at Khamisiyah, well, then the number went from a few hundred to a few thousand and then it went to 20,000 and I think the last estimate that we've heard is that maybe 100,000 soldiers were perhaps exposed. But then they say -- the next reaction is, well, don't worry, these were just low-level exposures because we know that unless there is an acute, dramatic response, it's not going to hurt you in the long run. Scientists disagree with that.

So from the very beginning any acknowledgement of the problem, any acknowledgement of the cause of the problem that went outside of their predetermined suppositions was like pulling teeth and that's where they are today. They really haven't moved much in six years.

Q: Now there are issues of getting services and compensation which -- this notion of service connectedness. Now how was this made problematic in your view?

A: Well, obviously if you do not believe that there's a cause -- first of all, if you believe there is no problem, why are you going to pay out benefits. Second of all, if there is no cause of the problem, you really don't have to worry about that in years to come. What some of us believe is that it is possible that if chemicals are related to Gulf War illness that some of the more severe symptoms may not erupt until 10 or 20 years down the line. So our position has got to be, A, there is a problem, it is very likely related to chemical exposures, and thirdly we have got to give the benefit of the doubt to the veterans so that those people who were over there who come down with illnesses in coming years that we think may have been related to their service in the Gulf War, we have got to make sure that they receive the treatment, get the compensation that they deserve.

Q: Wouldn't the VA say they were legally required to establish service connection, that their hands were bound by the law initially, there was no way they could pay out a benefit if they didn't believe there was a service connection?

A: Well, that's your catch-22 isn't it? I mean we believe -- some of us believe that there is a connection and we should have given the benefits of the doubt to the veterans.

Q: What kinds of things were you hearing from veterans about the Dept. of Defense?

A: I mean the Dept. of Defense treats those people still in active duty and I think that their attitude was not terribly different from the VA. The double problem though that you have with the DOD is that we still have people in the active duty and if people are feeling ill, if they're experiencing various symptoms and they're still in the active duty, they're less likely to come forward because that could result in their medical discharge. So instead of developing a groundwork and a climate of sympathetic understanding and say, look, we don't quite know what the problem is, but we have tens and tens of thousands of people who served there who are hurting, how can we help you, come forward, you are not going to penalized, you're not going to be financially punished for coming forward and reporting your symptoms, we want you to report your symptoms, that certainly has not been the attitude of the DOD.

Q: -- Can you talk a bit about what the DOD position was shortly after the war and how this changed?

A: The DOD position after the war is there is no problem,. And as more and more veterans came forward, as the media began to focus on the issue, as Congress took a look at it, finally what the DOD did say is yes, we are prepared to acknowledge that some of the people who served over there are ill, that was their major leap forward, but then their -- when asked why are they ill, their answer is it is a stress-related illness. We do not believe that chemicals have played any role. We do not believe the fact that we administered peridistigmide bromide, which is an experimental anti-nerve gas agent to hundreds of thousands of veterans, so we gave them vaccines, that they were exposed to very, very strong pesticides, that they may have been exposed to chemical warfare agents, we don't think that had any relationship to their problem at all, but we do think that some of these people may be ill, we think it's stress-related. That was their major breakthrough and that's pretty pathetic.

Q: Now, what do you think is really damaged them most politically, the DOD?

A: What's damaged them is their state of denial from day one about the cause of their problems. What's damaged them is their reluctance to fess up to the fact that chemicals may well have played a strong role in causing the illness. What has damaged them is that we have independent researchers all over this country who are beginning to see the links between chemicals and peridistigmine bromide and other environmental factors and that the VA and the DOD has kind of brushed that research aside and not embraced it. What has hurt them is that there are some scientists around the country, including a few within the VA themselves who are trying to develop treatment protocols which seem to be having success and yet they get rejected by the VA and the DOD leadership and be - -they get pushed aside.

So the bottom line is that I believe that members of the United States Congress, overwhelming majority, members of the -- people in our own country and certainly the veterans community believe there is a serious problem which begs for a solution, for an understanding of the cause, which begs out for effective treatment and the VA and the DOD have not been forthcoming and I think right now within the veterans community, certainly with the Congress, there is generally widespread feeling that they have failed their task and it is time to say, thank you, we have got to go elsewhere, to go to those researchers and those agencies who are prepared to take a hard look at the role that chemicals and other environmental factors may have played in the causation of Gulf War illness.

Q: A lot of criticism of the DOD concerns things they said, that turned out subsequently to be untrue. Do you feel their was a conscious effort at a conspiracy or just incompetence?

A: I am not into conspiracy theory and I'm not here to question the patriotism or the sincerity of the men and women in the VA and the DOD and the leadership. I think they're trying. But I think that for a variety of reasons they have not been successful in understanding the cause of the problem or developing a treatment.

Let's go back to 1991/1992. The United States had just won a great military victory, okay, the DOD had performed brilliantly, the number of casualties were far fewer than anyone had dreamed of. If you were in the DOD, would you be very excited in exposing the fact that perhaps the severity of injury and illness is much greater than we had anticipated? The number of casualties that we ended up having was far greater than we had originally thought. So maybe the victory was not so great. It was not something you would be terribly motivated to go forward and say, guess what, wait a second, you know we thought we got out of that almost clean, almost clear, we didn't, there are 10s of thousands of our people hurting as a result of the war. You would not be terribly motivated to do that.

Second of all, to the degree that chemicals may play -- may have played a role in Gulf War illness that suggests that we were not adequately prepared to deal with that problem despite the fact that everybody knew that Sadam Hussein had used those types of weapons in the past.

Thirdly, and very importantly, if in fact it can be shown that the administering of peridistigmine bromide is an important cause of the problem of Gulf War illness then the DOD is directly complicit in the problem. This is then an affirmative action. They gave a drug which may be related in the causation of the problem.

And fourthly, I think it makes people in the Pentagon kind of nervous to know that chemical agents and environmental factors could cause so much damage in terms of what may happen in the future.

So those are some of the reasons.

Q: So you're saying they didn't look very hard?

A: I would say that they were not motivated. If you win a smashing military victory and you're asked to conclude that maybe the vil -- maybe there were a lot more damage and injury and casualties than you had originally thought, you're not terribly well motivated, and you're doubly not motivated if in fact you administer the peridistigmine bromide as an anti-nerve gas agent and it turns out that may be part of the problem. You're certainly not terribly motivated to find the answer.

And lastly, and maybe even most importantly, is the whole role that chemicals play in making us ill and the whole phenomenon of what some people call multiple chemical sensitivity is in fact a hotly debated issue today in medical circles.

I have talked to groups of hundreds and hundreds of doctors who treat people because of chemical illness in the civilian sector. I have also talked to doctors who think that that whole line of thinking is a fraud and is way off the wall and these doctors are just money-makers. I happen to believe in the concept of multiple chemical sensitivity. I think that the synergistic impact of various chemicals can in fact make you sick whether you're in the civilian sector or in a military theatre, but that's a controversial area. I think within the DOD and the VA there are not many of their doctors there, their scientists who believe in that theory.

Q: But when it comes to issues like the existence of chemicals and what the alarms tell us and so forth and the issue of logs, was it your position that there was a conscious -- was it lying or a conscious coverup or is it that it was a sort of a they weren't looking very hard?

A: There's something very fishy there. We had people before our committee who were well trained in the detection of low levels and higher levels of chemical exposure. They were picking this up on very sophisticated machinery, they were picking it up out in the field, but somehow when they reported back to higher ups it did not go very far. At the last what one can say is that it was the position of the higher ups in the military theatre that chemicals were not used and therefore any reporting of chemical detections or reporting of alarms that went off must be false because we have already determined that chemicals were not used so how could it be true.

Q: Congressman, much of what's happened at the hearings has been some very moving testimony from veterans about a whole range of different things which they have attributed to service in the Gulf War and I want to be clear with you as to what you think might be included in Gulf War illnesses. We had, in some of the early testimony individuals with Lou Gehrig's disease and things like arthritis and so forth and even some cancers which normally have a long latency. Is it your position that those are real?

A: I'm not a physician and I can't give a diagnosis of every illness that occurred. I think, however, hearing the testimony from many of the men and women who came before us, talking to people over there from my own state of Vermont and doing some reading on the issue, there is no question in my mind, none, zero, that tens and tens and thousands of our soldiers are suffering from a wide range of illnesses which I believe are attributable to their service in the Gulf.

Q: But does this go beyond symptomatology to include things like Lou Gehrig's disease and cancer?

A: Could it? Again, I'm not a physician and I'm certainly not an expert on on that illness. Do I think it is possible? Yes, I think it is possible. Am I going to suggest to you that every illness that somebody is suffering today is directly attributable to their service, that people don't get ill, that you don't get ill or I don't get ill? No.

One of the areas that really concerns me is in my own state of Vermont and in the reports that we're receiving from soldiers who served all over the country is memory loss. Now memory loss, short term memory loss, long term memory loss for young healthy men and women should not be occurred to the degree that it is in the population we are looking at.

So there's no question to my mind that there are a wide range of illnesses suffered by our veterans, that many of those illnesses are attributable to their service in the Gulf, what I fear is that if many of these people have absorbed chemicals in their bodies that the eruption of the illness has not yet occurred and may occurred later -- may occur later, and one of the things that concerns me, we heard some testimony about this, is that you may have some walking time bombs out there and we should be a lot -- doing a lot better job warning them as to how they might be able to avoid an eruption of one illness or another.

Q: Many veterans claim their wives and family members and even their children have been affected by their experience at Gulf War. Do you believe this?

A: We have heard testimony from people who it seems to me are not lying, that their wives and their children are not ill. Now can I sit here and tell you absolutely and positively that the cause is Gulf War illness? I can't. But I tell what I would do is I would investigate that absolutely and completely. And again one of the criticisms of the DOD and the VA is that when they hear these things, they should be jumping to move in that area and to study that issue rather than saying, no, we don't think so or do a study, it'll take us 2 or 3 years to get the results.

What some of us want to see is what we call a Manhattan-type project where all of the resources of the government are brought together to understand in a short period of time the cause of the problem and the development of the most effective treatment possible, possible and certainly one of the areas that needs to pursues -- pursued, is this a contagious disease? Can it be transmitted sexually? That's a big issue and we have heard testimony that obviously wives and kids have been made ill. They believe that it's a result of something transmitted that their husbands picked up in the Gulf. Is it true? I can't say it is and I can't say it isn't, but what I do think is that we should investigate this absolutely and presume, and give the veterans and their families the benefit of the doubt.

Q: I move on to science and to start with the health outcomes that have been studied by various kinds of groups. There were cluster studies of the first outbreaks in Indiana and Georgia and I think there have been five blue ribbon panels that have looked at the issue and there are epidemiological studies in progress and under way. The consensus as far as I can see from these panels is we are not dealing with a unique syndrome. Agree or disagree?

A: I think what you're dealing with is a wide variety of symptoms which may have different causations.

Q: Now the President's Advisory Committee, which has studied this issue for two years have said among other things that the symptoms you describe, the sort of diverse symptomatology, such symptoms, number one, are common in the general population, and they're common in the aftermath of wars and they can be exacerbated by stress. Now this seems to have been a conclusion which has caused some hostility.

A: Let me suggest in my own personal opinion that stress is a very important factor. I mean everybody knows what stress does to people who keel over with heart attacks or have stomach problems and so forth. There was enormous stress in the theater in the Persian Gulf. So I have no doubt that stress played a role and if you combine the role of stress with the peridistigmine bromide with the other vaccines, with the chemicals that our soldiers were exposed to, I think stress did play a role.

The reason that I circulated a letter to my colleagues here in the House and we have something like 85 signers -- is we were upset that essentially the Presidential Advisory Committee said in our judgement we do not yet see the evidence that suggests that chemicals, peridistigmine bromide, etc., has played a role in the causation of these symptoms. We think that the illnesses are caused primarily by stress.

And that's what we disagreed with. Not to say that stress is not a factor. Stress certainly in my view is a factor, but to dismiss completely the impact of peridistigmine bromide, an experimental drug used for this purpose for the first time and given to several hundred thousand people when we already have signs of evidence that shows that peridistigmine bromide in combination with DEET and other pesticides can cause problems with animals, to dismiss all of that seems to me to be wrong and an area that needs to be pursued.

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Q: When did you first get involved with this issue?

A: A number of years ago. When we heard from people in the state of Vermont who were over in the Persian Gulf and started reading about some of what was going on and also obviously as a member of the subcommittee which is exploring the problem.

Q: Congressman, when you first got involved with this issue, what kinds of things were you hearing about the veterans? Let's talk first about the VA services.

A: What we were hearing is that people were going to the VA hospitals with problems and basically their problems were given short shrift, they were not taken seriously and either they were believed to have been malingerers and not have any problems at all or at best that the problems were quote-unquote "in their head." And then after awhile as more and more veterans reported illnesses, what we then began to hear was the VA finally saying or the DOD saying, well, yeah, there is a problem, but the problem is all stress-related. Yeah, we acknowledge there is a problem, but it's all stress-related and the truth of the matter is they haven't really moved terribly much from that position despite the fact that there have been a number of studies that have been done by very reputable scientists who have pointed out a very strong link between chemical exposures, peridistigmide bromide, vaccines, and so forth and so on, but that's a line of inquiry that the VA and the DOD have been very reluctant to pursue.

Q: Back then what was it about their attitude that bothered you?

A: What bothered me is that from the very beginning, from the very beginning they either denied that there was a problem, they thought the problem was in the heads of the veterans -- they did not take the problem seriously rather than saying, okay, you have a problem veteran -- or thousands of veterans have a problem, let's try to understand what the cause of that problem is. Let's develop the most effective treatment that we can for you rather than from the very beginning what they were saying is there is no problem and they were saying this not only in terms of the ailments and the symptoms that our veterans were experiencing, when some people said gee, maybe chemical warfare agents are a cause of the problem, are tied into the problem. What their positions was none of our veterans, none of our soldiers were exposed to any chemical warfare agents, none at all.

And then after people on our committee, people in congress, people outside of Congress said, you're wrong, you're wrong, they said, oh, yes, oh, yes, a few hundred soldiers were exposed to chemical warfare agents at Khamisiyah, well, then the number went from a few hundred to a few thousand and then it went to 20,000 and I think the last estimate that we've heard is that maybe 100,000 soldiers were perhaps exposed. But then they say -- the next reaction is, well, don't worry, these were just low-level exposures because we know that unless there is an acute, dramatic response, it's not going to hurt you in the long run. Scientists disagree with that.

So from the very beginning any acknowledgement of the problem, any acknowledgement of the cause of the problem that went outside of their predetermined suppositions was like pulling teeth and that's where they are today. They really haven't moved much in six years.

Q: Now there are issues of getting services and compensation which -- this notion of service connectedness. Now how was this made problematic in your view?

A: Well, obviously if you do not believe that there's a cause -- first of all, if you believe there is no problem, why are you going to pay out benefits. Second of all, if there is no cause of the problem, you really don't have to worry about that in years to come. What some of us believe is that it is possible that if chemicals are related to Gulf War illness that some of the more severe symptoms may not erupt until 10 or 20 years down the line. So our position has got to be, A, there is a problem, it is very likely related to chemical exposures, and thirdly we have got to give the benefit of the doubt to the veterans so that those people who were over there who come down with illnesses in coming years that we think may have been related to their service in the Gulf War, we have got to make sure that they receive the treatment, get the compensation that they deserve.

Q: Wouldn't the VA say they were legally required to establish service connection, that their hands were bound by the law initially, there was no way they could pay out a benefit if they didn't believe there was a service connection?

A: Well, that's your catch-22 isn't it? I mean we believe -- some of us believe that there is a connection and we should have given the benefits of the doubt to the veterans.

Q: What kinds of things were you hearing from veterans about the Dept. of Defense?

A: I mean the Dept. of Defense treats those people still in active duty and I think that their attitude was not terribly different from the VA. The double problem though that you have with the DOD is that we still have people in the active duty and if people are feeling ill, if they're experiencing various symptoms and they're still in the active duty, they're less likely to come forward because that could result in their medical discharge. So instead of developing a groundwork and a climate of sympathetic understanding and say, look, we don't quite know what the problem is, but we have tens and tens of thousands of people who served there who are hurting, how can we help you, come forward, you are not going to penalized, you're not going to be financially punished for coming forward and reporting your symptoms, we want you to report your symptoms, that certainly has not been the attitude of the DOD.

Q: -- Can you talk a bit about what the DOD position was shortly after the war and how this changed?

A: The DOD position after the war is there is no problem,. And as more and more veterans came forward, as the media began to focus on the issue, as Congress took a look at it, finally what the DOD did say is yes, we are prepared to acknowledge that some of the people who served over there are ill, that was their major leap forward, but then their -- when asked why are they ill, their answer is it is a stress-related illness. We do not believe that chemicals have played any role. We do not believe the fact that we administered peridistigmide bromide, which is an experimental anti-nerve gas agent to hundreds of thousands of veterans, so we gave them vaccines, that they were exposed to very, very strong pesticides, that they may have been exposed to chemical warfare agents, we don't think that had any relationship to their problem at all, but we do think that some of these people may be ill, we think it's stress-related. That was their major breakthrough and that's pretty pathetic.

Q: Now, what do you think is really damaged them most politically, the DOD?

A: What's damaged them is their state of denial from day one about the cause of their problems. What's damaged them is their reluctance to fess up to the fact that chemicals may well have played a strong role in causing the illness. What has damaged them is that we have independent researchers all over this country who are beginning to see the links between chemicals and peridistigmine bromide and other environmental factors and that the VA and the DOD has kind of brushed that research aside and not embraced it. What has hurt them is that there are some scientists around the country, including a few within the VA themselves who are trying to develop treatment protocols which seem to be having success and yet they get rejected by the VA and the DOD leadership and be - -they get pushed aside.

So the bottom line is that I believe that members of the United States Congress, overwhelming majority, members of the -- people in our own country and certainly the veterans community believe there is a serious problem which begs for a solution, for an understanding of the cause, which begs out for effective treatment and the VA and the DOD have not been forthcoming and I think right now within the veterans community, certainly with the Congress, there is generally widespread feeling that they have failed their task and it is time to say, thank you, we have got to go elsewhere, to go to those researchers and those agencies who are prepared to take a hard look at the role that chemicals and other environmental factors may have played in the causation of Gulf War illness.

Q: A lot of criticism of the DOD concerns things they said, that turned out subsequently to be untrue. Do you feel their was a conscious effort at a conspiracy or just incompetence?

A: I am not into conspiracy theory and I'm not here to question the patriotism or the sincerity of the men and women in the VA and the DOD and the leadership. I think they're trying. But I think that for a variety of reasons they have not been successful in understanding the cause of the problem or developing a treatment.

Let's go back to 1991/1992. The United States had just won a great military victory, okay, the DOD had performed brilliantly, the number of casualties were far fewer than anyone had dreamed of. If you were in the DOD, would you be very excited in exposing the fact that perhaps the severity of injury and illness is much greater than we had anticipated? The number of casualties that we ended up having was far greater than we had originally thought. So maybe the victory was not so great. It was not something you would be terribly motivated to go forward and say, guess what, wait a second, you know we thought we got out of that almost clean, almost clear, we didn't, there are 10s of thousands of our people hurting as a result of the war. You would not be terribly motivated to do that.

Second of all, to the degree that chemicals may play -- may have played a role in Gulf War illness that suggests that we were not adequately prepared to deal with that problem despite the fact that everybody knew that Sadam Hussein had used those types of weapons in the past.

Thirdly, and very importantly, if in fact it can be shown that the administering of peridistigmine bromide is an important cause of the problem of Gulf War illness then the DOD is directly complicit in the problem. This is then an affirmative action. They gave a drug which may be related in the causation of the problem.

And fourthly, I think it makes people in the Pentagon kind of nervous to know that chemical agents and environmental factors could cause so much damage in terms of what may happen in the future.

So those are some of the reasons.

Q: So you're saying they didn't look very hard?

A: I would say that they were not motivated. If you win a smashing military victory and you're asked to conclude that maybe the vil -- maybe there were a lot more damage and injury and casualties than you had originally thought, you're not terribly well motivated, and you're doubly not motivated if in fact you administer the peridistigmine bromide as an anti-nerve gas agent and it turns out that may be part of the problem. You're certainly not terribly motivated to find the answer.

And lastly, and maybe even most importantly, is the whole role that chemicals play in making us ill and the whole phenomenon of what some people call multiple chemical sensitivity is in fact a hotly debated issue today in medical circles.

I have talked to groups of hundreds and hundreds of doctors who treat people because of chemical illness in the civilian sector. I have also talked to doctors who think that that whole line of thinking is a fraud and is way off the wall and these doctors are just money-makers. I happen to believe in the concept of multiple chemical sensitivity. I think that the synergistic impact of various chemicals can in fact make you sick whether you're in the civilian sector or in a military theatre, but that's a controversial area. I think within the DOD and the VA there are not many of their doctors there, their scientists who believe in that theory.

Q: But when it comes to issues like the existence of chemicals and what the alarms tell us and so forth and the issue of logs, was it your position that there was a conscious -- was it lying or a conscious coverup or is it that it was a sort of a they weren't looking very hard?

A: There's something very fishy there. We had people before our committee who were well trained in the detection of low levels and higher levels of chemical exposure. They were picking this up on very sophisticated machinery, they were picking it up out in the field, but somehow when they reported back to higher ups it did not go very far. At the last what one can say is that it was the position of the higher ups in the military theatre that chemicals were not used and therefore any reporting of chemical detections or reporting of alarms that went off must be false because we have already determined that chemicals were not used so how could it be true.

Q: Congressman, much of what's happened at the hearings has been some very moving testimony from veterans about a whole range of different things which they have attributed to service in the Gulf War and I want to be clear with you as to what you think might be included in Gulf War illnesses. We had, in some of the early testimony individuals with Lou Gehrig's disease and things like arthritis and so forth and even some cancers which normally have a long latency. Is it your position that those are real?

A: I'm not a physician and I can't give a diagnosis of every illness that occurred. I think, however, hearing the testimony from many of the men and women who came before us, talking to people over there from my own state of Vermont and doing some reading on the issue, there is no question in my mind, none, zero, that tens and tens and thousands of our soldiers are suffering from a wide range of illnesses which I believe are attributable to their service in the Gulf.

Q: But does this go beyond symptomatology to include things like Lou Gehrig's disease and cancer?

A: Could it? Again, I'm not a physician and I'm certainly not an expert on on that illness. Do I think it is possible? Yes, I think it is possible. Am I going to suggest to you that every illness that somebody is suffering today is directly attributable to their service, that people don't get ill, that you don't get ill or I don't get ill? No.

One of the areas that really concerns me is in my own state of Vermont and in the reports that we're receiving from soldiers who served all over the country is memory loss. Now memory loss, short term memory loss, long term memory loss for young healthy men and women should not be occurred to the degree that it is in the population we are looking at.

So there's no question to my mind that there are a wide range of illnesses suffered by our veterans, that many of those illnesses are attributable to their service in the Gulf, what I fear is that if many of these people have absorbed chemicals in their bodies that the eruption of the illness has not yet occurred and may occurred later -- may occur later, and one of the things that concerns me, we heard some testimony about this, is that you may have some walking time bombs out there and we should be a lot -- doing a lot better job warning them as to how they might be able to avoid an eruption of one illness or another.

Q: Many veterans claim their wives and family members and even their children have been affected by their experience at Gulf War. Do you believe this?

A: We have heard testimony from people who it seems to me are not lying, that their wives and their children are not ill. Now can I sit here and tell you absolutely and positively that the cause is Gulf War illness? I can't. But I tell what I would do is I would investigate that absolutely and completely. And again one of the criticisms of the DOD and the VA is that when they hear these things, they should be jumping to move in that area and to study that issue rather than saying, no, we don't think so or do a study, it'll take us 2 or 3 years to get the results.

What some of us want to see is what we call a Manhattan-type project where all of the resources of the government are brought together to understand in a short period of time the cause of the problem and the development of the most effective treatment possible, possible and certainly one of the areas that needs to pursues -- pursued, is this a contagious disease? Can it be transmitted sexually? That's a big issue and we have heard testimony that obviously wives and kids have been made ill. They believe that it's a result of something transmitted that their husbands picked up in the Gulf. Is it true? I can't say it is and I can't say it isn't, but what I do think is that we should investigate this absolutely and presume, and give the veterans and their families the benefit of the doubt.

Q: I move on to science and to start with the health outcomes that have been studied by various kinds of groups. There were cluster studies of the first outbreaks in Indiana and Georgia and I think there have been five blue ribbon panels that have looked at the issue and there are epidemiological studies in progress and under way. The consensus as far as I can see from these panels is we are not dealing with a unique syndrome. Agree or disagree?

A: I think what you're dealing with is a wide variety of symptoms which may have different causations.

Q: Now the President's Advisory Committee, which has studied this issue for two years have said among other things that the symptoms you describe, the sort of diverse symptomatology, such symptoms, number one, are common in the general population, and they're common in the aftermath of wars and they can be exacerbated by stress. Now this seems to have been a conclusion which has caused some hostility.

A: Let me suggest in my own personal opinion that stress is a very important factor. I mean everybody knows what stress does to people who keel over with heart attacks or have stomach problems and so forth. There was enormous stress in the theater in the Persian Gulf. So I have no doubt that stress played a role and if you combine the role of stress with the peridistigmine bromide with the other vaccines, with the chemicals that our soldiers were exposed to, I think stress did play a role.

The reason that I circulated a letter to my colleagues here in the House and we have something like 85 signers -- is we were upset that essentially the Presidential Advisory Committee said in our judgement we do not yet see the evidence that suggests that chemicals, peridistigmine bromide, etc., has played a role in the causation of these symptoms. We think that the illnesses are caused primarily by stress.

And that's what we disagreed with. Not to say that stress is not a factor. Stress certainly in my view is a factor, but to dismiss completely the impact of peridistigmine bromide, an experimental drug used for this purpose for the first time and given to several hundred thousand people when we already have signs of evidence that shows that peridistigmine bromide in combination with DEET and other pesticides can cause problems with animals, to dismiss all of that seems to me to be wrong and an area that needs to be pursued.

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