Statement of Ross Perot

Subcommittee on National Security, Veterans Affairs
and International Relations, Committee on Government Reform,

Mr. Chairman, thank you and the other members of the subcommittee for your leadership commitment and persistence in supporting our military forces with the long series of hearings you've held since the early 90's. Along with the great leadership of Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and others in the Senate, you have kept the public aware of the ignored battlefield wounds of our Gulf War veterans.

I am pleased that Mr. George and Lord Morris of the British Parliament are here to take part in this hearing. It is important that we get the research properly coordinated with our allies.

Today, we have no effective defense against these chemical weapons for our troops and for our entire population.

This hearing comes at a particularly good time. It follows Secretary Principi's announcement yesterday that he is forming the new Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Illness, composed of Gulf War veterans and scientists with outstanding credentials, who will develop a plan of action to define the illnesses, successfully treat them, and develop ways to protect our armed forces and our entire population in the future.

This week's events signal a major turn in the government's approach to this problem. President Bush has made it clear that he wants a new approach to really solve this problem so that we can get treatment to our wounded veterans and prevent this from happening again in future military campaigns.

At the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, tens of thousands of our troops returned home with severe health problems, with the following symptoms.

By 1993, it was obvious that these symptoms were getting worse and that huge numbers of soldiers and their families were ill.

Instead of dealing with these symptoms in a proper manner using the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control to investigate these illnesses professionally, a group of civilian government employees, with little research experience, was established within the Pentagon and the VA Central Office to direct the research. This was the Research Working Group of the Persian Gulf Veterans Coordinating Board.

Over the years it became more and more apparent that this group's mission, as directed by the Clinton White House and his Presidential Advisory Committee, was to dismiss these serious health problems as stress and ignore these wounded soldiers.

Over the past thirty years, I have received emergency calls from generals and admirals in the middle of the night seeking medical help for severely wounded enlisted men and women.

In early 1994 a group of soldiers came to see me, asking for assistance in determining the cause of their illness. They brought pictures of themselves before going into combat.

The contrast in looking at these pictures and the soldiers in their present deteriorated condition was heartbreaking.

In talking with my contacts in the Defense Department, I learned about the Research Working Group that controlled research.

This research working group's mission was to avoid professionally and objectively doing research on these serious health problems.

I went to the private sector, to the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, and sought the help of their leading doctors. This medical school has more Nobel Prize recipients actively working, than any other medical school in the world. It has an impeccable reputation for doing quality research, and they have a long history of providing successful treatment for wounded soldiers that I referred to them.

The UT Southwestern faculty selected one of their top clinical researchers, Dr. Robert Haley, to lead this new research effort. Dr. Haley worked at the Centers for Disease Control for ten years. On the 50th anniversary of the CDC, Dr. Haley was recognized as the director of one of the five most important investigations in the history of CDC. In addition, Dr. Haley received the Public's Health Service Commendation Medal, the Center for Disease Control's highest award.

I agreed to fund the initial phase of the research if we could have the full cooperation of the Pentagon to provide needed information.

In January 1997, Dr. Haley and his research team published three landmark articles in the Journal of the American Medical Association, one of the world's top medical journals.

The reports were the first to present strong scientific evidence in support of the theory that Gulf War syndrome is a brain injury from chemical exposures, and not stress. This was
clearly an important advance that should have been followed up on, quickly and aggressively.

Dr. Haley and his team submitted a grant proposal through the Research Working Group's peer-reviewed grant funding system, administered at Ft. Detrick. Their proposal was turned down twice.

Dr. Haley then appealed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of Defense. They found the work to be promising and provided Dr. Haley's group with partial funding to continue their work.

This funding led to the further important discoveries that he will describe later this morning.

Most importantly, Dr. Haley's team developed a brain scanning approach that demonstrated the damaged brain cells in the deep parts of the brain in the sick veterans. Their finding was published in a top peer-reviewed medical journal. Recently this finding was replicated in another group of Gulf War veterans by one of the world's leading brain imaging scientists at the University of California at San Francisco. He did the replication study with private funding outside the peer-review funding system of the government's Research Working Group.

Dr. Haley and his team also published evidence that a gene--called the PON gene--predisposed soldiers to getting Gulf War syndrome. This finding was recently reproduced by leading scientists at the University of Manchester in the UK &endash; also with private funding outside the peer-review funding system of government's Research Working Group.

The UT Southwestern team has submitted seven grant proposals to the peer-review funding system of the Research Working Group and Ft. Detrick, and none of them has been funded. And yet, Dr. Haley and his team have published over 20 papers on this subject in top medical journals. Each of these papers had to pass rigorous peer review by the journal's expert doctors before it could be published. This Peer Review Process for scientific publication, not the peer-review process for funding, is the measure of scientific merit.

Do you see a pattern developing here? The innovative advances in understanding the veterans' illness have come from private sector scientists. They are operating under funding outside the peer-reviewed funding system administered by the Government Research Working Group, and yet they have been able to get their results published in the leading peer-reviewed medical journals. Even the scientific replication has had to come from private funding outside the government's peer review.

One constant throughout these efforts, is that the Research Working Group and others inside the Pentagon and the VA Central Office have repeatedly tried to impede this research.

Information and data needed to continue the research have been denied, and official letters have been sent to the Research Working Group telling them not to fund Dr. Haley's research, regardless of how many discoveries his group makes or how many top papers they publish.

The Research Working Group is the same group that insists, no matter what evidence is presented about the soldier's disabilities, that these men are only suffering from stress.

Let's put this stress theory into perspective with prior wars. At last count, 16% of the 700,000 troops who served in Desert Storm have been awarded disability benefits by the VA, in a war that only lasted 100 hours&emdash;16 percent.

Only 9.6% of Vietnam veterans were awarded disability benefits, a long harsh war that lasted ten years.

The Research Working group has spent $500 million so far in their response to Gulf War illness&emdash;half a billion dollars!

Last year the GAO produced an analysis of this research and found that of the 21 major research questions proposed by the Research Working Group, as high priorities to Gulf War illness, not one question has been answered after spending $500 million. Not one!

$175 million was spent on the Combined Clinical Evaluation Protocol and the VA's Persian
Gulf Examination Program. These programs provided basic physical exams for over 100,000 Gulf War veterans, but they did not include tests, like brain scans and genetic tests, that would lead to identifying the problem. It was a complete waste of money.

$150 million has been spent on the activities of OSAGWI, the Office of Special Assistance for Gulf War Illness. Its primary focus was to convince the American people that the veterans are only suffering from stress. It was a $150 million public relations campaign. The top doctor in OSAGWI now works for the VA's Office of Research!

When veterans and the media complained about what OSAGWI was doing, President Clinton appointed a Presidential Special Oversight Board to look into it. Just before their report came out giving OSAGWI a clean bill of health, the leading scientists on the staff resigned in protest, claiming that their reports critical of OSAGWI had been changed to positive.

One of the top managers of that Special Oversight Board, a long-time PR man for the Pentagon, is reported to have said over and over, "The only problem with the Gulf War illness is that we did not manage the press soon enough." This man now works in the VA's Office of Research!

Another $175 million has gone into the Research Working Group's peer-review funded research. But what has come out of their research? Basically, the peer-review funding system supported a lot of research on stress, and they funded a lot of studies to show that Gulf War veterans are not very sick.

Three years ago, Dr. Kang, a researcher in the VA Central Office, completed a large study of 20,000 veterans showing that there is a neurological Gulf War syndrome and that veterans who were exposed to low-level nerve gas were 7 times more likely to have it. This directly duplicated Dr. Haley's epidemiologic study. But after three years, where is the journal publication? It appears that they have withheld it from publication because the findings violate the government's stress policy.

Dr. Kang recently published another study showing that the children born to Gulf War veterans have 2 to 3 times more birth defects than those born to other military personnel.
But government officials diffused that finding by saying that they had not yet reviewed the medical records of the babies to be sure the veterans weren't lying about birth defects.
How many years does it take to review those medical records?

In short, the research funded by the peer-review system of the Research Working Group seems to have been put through a filter, and only that showing stress gets through. All the rest is filtered out.

Any government employee who questions the stress theory is open to sudden intense criticism, as are the researchers with distinguished credentials in the private sector. This is inexcusable.

The good news is we have a new Commander-in-Chief in the White House who has made it clear that he will do whatever is required to properly care for these soldiers.

Here are some excerpts from a speech President Bush made to veterans in New Hampshire,
I quote:

"America's veterans today ask only that our government honor its commitments as they honored theirs. They ask that their interests be protected, as they protected our country's interests in foreign lands."

Now if anyone doubts that President Bush will honor these commitments, they only have to look at what his new Secretary of Veterans Affairs, Anthony Principi, has done since taking office in March of this year.

As soon as he came in, we started seeing emissaries being sent out of Washington to the homes of the sickest veterans, making sure they are being properly cared for.

As soon as Secretary Principi saw research showing a connection with Lou Gehrig's disease, he ordered it service-connected.

And now, he has announced his new Research Advisory Committee. This committee will be composed of outstanding scientists and doctors who will, for the first time, work to objectively solve the problem. It will report directly to him, and will be properly funded so that it can successfully complete its mission.

I have every confidence that positive constructive action will be taken to deal with these serious problems.

I would like to thank the Congressmen and International guests who are here today, for standing on principle and doing everything possible to provide treatment for these wounded soldiers and their families and protection for our troops in future wars.

You have not forgotten Abraham Lincoln's words, "Any nation that does not honor its heroes will not long endure."