Dan Burton

Mr. BURTON of Indiana

Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Mr. Speaker, I think the gentleman covered the issue very well. I just wanted to make one comment, and that is that some of the pharmaceutical companies, like SmithKline of England, are going into Canada and saying if you sell pharmaceutical drugs in the United States for the price that you are paying in Canada, which is about one-fourth or one-half of what they are here, we are going to cut you off. They are doing that in a bullying way. I do not think pharmaceutical companies should say to a country, you cannot sell those drugs in the United States because it is the same product that in America we are paying two or three times for it. It makes no sense to me.

Mr. BURTON of Indiana

Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me time. I agree with what my colleague with the great voice, the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Davis), just said; and I rise in support of the Postal Civil Service Retirement System Funding Reform Act of 2003. I commend the gentleman from Virginia (Chairman Tom Davis) on our side of the aisle for guiding this bill through this legislative body at this time. It is very important that we have a strong and viable postal service, and that is why during the last Congress I was disappointed when we did not pass the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act. The gentleman from New York (Mr. McHugh) and others worked very hard on that legislation, and it would have helped a great deal. As the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Tom Davis) just said a few minutes ago, there are a lot of problems with the postal service that need to be addressed, but this is a very important one; and that is why I am happy to see this bill before us today. Why is immediate action needed? Because, if we do not do anything, that simply is not an option. If Congress does not correct the retirement benefit formula in current law, postal rates will probably increase in the not-too-distant future, and everybody who deals with the postal service and has businesses understands how important that is. Such an increase in postal rates in the current economic environment threatens the postal service, its employees and the entire country, as well as the mailing industry. Congress has a duty to ensure that the U.S. Postal Service is on a sound fiscal footing and to protect the American postal customers from unstable rates. Changing the way the U.S. Postal Service retirement payments are made is going to go a long way toward accomplishing that goal. Without this change, businesses throughout the country will continue to be unfairly taxed by having postal rate increases. This bill is very, very needed and will ensure stable postal rates into the foreseeable future, and I think will help facilitate an economic recovery in many sectors of the economy. Once again I want to thank the gentleman from Virginia (Chairman Tom Davis) for his hard work on this. He is doing a great job as a new chairman, and I appreciate that.

Mr. BURTON of Indiana

Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Mr. Speaker, on a regular basis I come down here and talk about children who are autistic and the reasons for it. We have been receiving letters from across the country from literally hundreds and probably thousands of parents who have autistic children, and they do not know what to do about it, and all of them believe their children were damaged by the mercury that is in vaccines. It has been in children's vaccines for a long, long time. Children get between 25 and 30 vaccinations before they go to school, and up until just recently almost all of them contained thimerosal which was 50 percent mercury. We all know mercury is toxic to the brain, and yet they had it as a preservative in vaccines. And our children, in my opinion, and scientists and doctors from across the globe and here in the States believe that mercury in the vaccines was one of the major causes. Here on this easel I have pictures of probably 50 or 60 or 70 kids who were damaged by the mercury in the vaccines, and I have letters that I read every night. We have a system here called the Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund that is supposed to take care of these children if they are damaged by vaccines. It has $1.8 billion in it. It is supposed to protect the pharmaceutical companies from lawsuits, and yet these parents of these kids have had a very difficult time getting satisfaction and restitution from that fund, and many of them, because there was a 3-year statute of limitations, could not even get in the fund. The reason I bring this up right now is because we are in the process of working on legislation that would deal with this problem, that would help these kids who missed the opportunity by getting in that 3-year window of opportunity to be put in the program so that their case could be reviewed on a case-by-case basis by the special master. These families are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, they are going bankrupt, selling their homes, borrowing money, doing everything to help their children, and there is nowhere for them to turn. We need to make sure that they have access to this fund for which it was created and not have to go to courts to have class action lawsuits. And that is what we are working on with the other body and the majority leader in the other body to get done. I want to read just a couple of letters that come from these people who have no place to turn. Here is a letter that came from a Marcy Kelly from Mullica Hill, New Jersey, and she writes: ``My son turned 4 in October, 2002, and was diagnosed with autism after a long history of medical problems that began at 2 months, within 1 week of his first series of thimerosal-containing vaccines. His immune system, weakened to where he couldn't handle viruses (resulting in recurring ear infections and RSV), he had reflux, terrible allergies and eczema, and a reaction to his MMR shot that is documented to have caused vomiting nightly for 6 months post vaccination and 2 years of diarrhea. Medical tests show toxic levels of metals, reduced glutathione, malabsorption, maldigestion, severe allergies, and liver problems, all common in those poisoned by mercury. He regressed into autism between 18 and 24 months.'' As a father and grandfather, you understand the heartbreak that I felt. This is a picture of him. ``We have spent well over $100,000 in the last 2 years, mostly on medical visits, tests, and therapies. Our insurance company, Aetna US Healthcare, stopped paying for these funds.'' So they have noplace to go. And she ends up by saying, ``I understand that you intend to take our stories before Congress, not individually but as a group. If you could take a single child (or family with more than one child on the spectrum) and pile up all of the medical and therapy bills, ADA drill books and materials, and supplements used to help them heal from the effects of vaccines, it would be quite mountainous and tell a story as well. God be with you and with other politicians as they vote on matters relating to autism. In the quiet of night, if politicians would ask themselves the question `what is right?' the answer in their hearts would be to help their children and their families.'' We have the ability to do that, and we must do something and we must do it very soon, because these families are suffering; and we have to be very diligent to make sure the other body does not put some language in the bill that would be like what was in the homeland security bill which protected pharmaceutical companies but not the children. I yield to the gentlewoman from California.

Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, we will contact the gentlewoman on that legislation. We will be down here every night that is available to talk about this issue. I thank the gentlewoman.

Mr. BURTON of Indiana

Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Mr. Speaker, the small nation of Eritrea occupies a very strategic location on the coast of the Red Sea. This is an area that is and will continue to be very important to our country's security interests. Fortunately, Eritrea is a stable, reliable friend of the United States. Practically alone in its region and in its continent of Africa, Eritrea is developing a democratic, accountable, and responsible government. I have been privileged to know many of Eritrea's leaders, since the time that they were freedom fighters struggling against the communist Mengistu regime in Ethiopia. Over all these years, they have been consistent in advocating, and implementing decent values. I am especially gratified that Eritrea is one of the countries standing shoulder to shoulder with us now in the ``Coalition of the Willing''. I might add that they are one of only two countries in all of Africa to do so. I would like to insert into the Congressional Record an excerpt of an article written by Robert Kaplan, which appeared in the April issue of the Atlantic monthly and focuses on Eritrea. I commend this article to all my colleagues in Congress who want to know which countries of the world are deserving of the label ``U.S. ally'' and worthy of American support. Eritrea On the Horn of Africa, just a forty-five-minute flight from Yemen, across the Red Sea choke point of the Bab el Mandeb (``The Gate of Lament''), is the newly independent, sleepily calm, and remarkably stable state of Eritrea. While the West promotes democracy, market liberalization, military demobilization, and the muting of ethnic hatreds as necessary to domestic tranquillity, Eritrea, at least for the moment, provides a rejoinder to all that. The country has achieved a degree of non-coercive social discipline and efficiency enviable in the developing world and particularly in Africa-- and it has done so by ignoring the West's advice on democracy and development, by cultivating a sometimes obsessive and narcissistic dislike of its neighbors, and by not demobilizing its vast army, built up during a thirty-year conflict with Ethiopia, unless there are jobs waiting for the troops. Whereas Yemen's streets and shops are plastered with photos of President Saleh (whose cult of personality is mild compared with those of other Arab and African leaders), one never sees such photos of the Eritrean President, Isaias Afewerki, the veritable founder of this country. For decades Afewerki led a low-intensity guerrilla movement that finally wrested independence from Ethiopia in 1991. ``Photos of me would create an air of mystery and distance from the people,'' he told me in December. ``It's the lack of photos that liberates you. I hate high walls and armed guards.'' While other leaders in the region live inside forbidding military compounds, Afewerki lives in a modest suburban-style house and greets people in his secretary's office, which sits at the end of an undistinguished corridor. He moves around the capital in the passenger seat of a four-wheel-drive vehicle, with only one escort car, stopping at red lights. Western diplomats here say they have seen him disappear into large crowds of Eritreans without any security detail at all. ``It's easy to put a bullet in him, and he knows it,'' one foreign diplomat said to me. Security, which consumes the Western diplomatic and aid communities in Sana'a (and everywhere else in the Middle East), is barely an issue in Asmara, Eritrea's capital. Despite its tattered storefronts, Asmara not only is one of the cleanest capital cities in Africa but also may be the only capital south of the Sahara where one can leave the car doors unlocked or prowl the back streets at all hours without fear of being robbed, even though the police are barely in evidence. American, Israeli, and other resident diplomats and aid administrators in Eritrea move freely around the country without guards or other escorts, as if they were at home. Desperately poor and drought-stricken, with almost three quarters of its 3.5 million inhabitants illiterate, Eritrea nonetheless has a surprisingly functional social order. Women run shops, restaurants, and hotels; handicapped people have shiny new crutches and wheelchairs; people drive slowly and even attend driving school; scrap-metal junkyards are restricted to the urban outskirts; receipts are given for every transaction; there are few electricity blackouts from sloppy maintenance or badly managed energy resources. Foreign diplomats in Asmara praise the country's lack of corruption and its effective implementation of aid projects. Whereas rural health clinics in much of Africa have empty shelves and unexplained shortages of supplies, clinic managers in Eritrea keep ledgers documenting where all the medicine is going. An immense fish farm near the port of Massawa testifies to Eritrea's ability to utilize foreign aid and know-how. The 1,500-acre complex channels salt water from the Red Sea, purifies it, and then uses it to raise shrimp in scores of circular cement tanks. The nutrient-rich excess of that process is used for breeding tilapia, a freshwater fish. The remaining waste water is pumped into asparagus and mangrove fields and artificially created wetlands. Though the operation was initially overseen by a firm from Phoenix, Arizona, and for a time employed an Israeli consultant, the consultant is now only rarely used. The Eritreans themselves run the operation in every respect. Such initiative and communal discipline are the result of an almost Maoist degree of mobilization and an almost Albanian degree of xenophobia--but without the epic scale of repression and ideological indoctrination that once characterized China and Albania. The Eritrean xenophobia and aptitude for organization are, as Eritreans never cease to explain, products of culture and historical experience more than they are of policy choices. Eritrea never had feudal structures, sheikhs, or warlords. Villages were commonly owned and were governed by councils, or baitos, of elders. ``It was not a society deferential to individual authority,'' I was told by Yemane Ghebre Meskel, the director of President Afewerki's office, ``so we didn't need Marxist ideology to achieve a high stage of communalism.'' Wolde-Ab Yisak, the president of the University of Asmara, observed, ``Communal self-reliance is our dogma, which in turn comes from the knowledge that we Eritreans are different from our neighbors.'' (On my flight out of Eritrea, I overheard a teenage Eritrean girl from the diaspora lecturing her younger siblings in American English about how ``the Ethiopians murdered our people.'') A monument in downtown Asmara definitively symbolizes such self-reliance, collectivity, and rudimentary survival. The monument celebrates not an individual, or even a generic guerrilla fighter, but a giant pair of sandals--shedas, in the native Tigrinya language. Such sandals, worn by every Eritrean fighter during the long struggle with Ethiopia, were homemade from recycled tire rubber, and gave fighters the ability to move quickly in the stony desert war zone. The monument shows what mythic proportions the conflict with Ethiopia has achieved in the minds of Eritreans; it has come to supersede the power of religion itself, in a society split evenly between Islam and Orthodox Christianity. This is an impressive achievement on a continent where Muslims and Christians are forming increasingly antagonistic group identities. Eritrea's clarified sense of nationhood, rare in a world of nation-states rent by tribalism and globalization, is in part a legacy of Italian colonialism. ``We acknowledge that the legacy of colonialism was not all negative,'' says Yemane Ghebreab, the political-affairs officer of the People's Front for Democracy and Justice--successor to the country's guerrilla force, the Eritrean People's Liberation Front. Having conquered Eritrea in the late nineteenth century, the Italians had by the late 1930s turned their new colony into one of the most highly industrialized places in Africa, with road and railway networks that united a people previously divided by mountains and deserts. To drive from Asmara to Massawa--a descent of more than 7,500 feet in only seventy miles, down tangled vertebrae of coppery-green peaks, on a road of never-ending switchbacks, bridges, and embankments, built by Mussolini in the mid-1930s and kept in excellent condition by Eritrean highway crews working seven days a week--is to experience the historical energy of the industrialized West transplanted successfully to an African nation. Another benefit of Italian colonialism, according to Ghebre Meskel, was town planning. Rather than concentrate everything in Asmara, the Italians developed Massawa and similar towns so as to prevent the overcentralization that now plagues other developing countries. To stem migration into Asmara and preserve this legacy, the Eritrean government has tried to improve life in rural areas; thus Asmara is not surrounded by shantytowns that might breed political extremism. Following the defeat of Fascist Italy in World War II, and the dissolution of its East African empire, the new United Nations voted to incorporate Eritrea into Ethiopia. The Eritreans, unhappy with this decision, finally revolted in 1961. For thirteen years Eritrean guerrillas fought an Ethiopia backed by the United States. In 1974, when Ethiopia's Emperor Haile Selassie was overthrown, leading to a Marxist regime headed by Mengistu Haile Mariam, Eritrean guerrilla activity did not cease, and from then on the Eritreans fought an Ethiopia backed by the Soviet Union. Despite their ability to grind away at a Soviet-supplied war machine, which featured MiG fighter jets in the air and Soviet generals on the battlefield, the secretive and independent-minded Eritreans received no aid under the Reagan Doctrine (a U.S. program for arming Third World anti- communist insurgencies). Nevertheless, in 1991 Eritrean and Tigrean guerrillas, fighting on separate fronts, defeated Mengistu, and Eritrean tanks rolled triumphantly into the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa. In the minds of the Eritreans, they had fought and won a three-decade struggle against a state ten times as populous, with no help from either of the superpowers or anyone else in the outside world. They now feel that they owe nothing to anybody, and they are filled with disdain for international opinion. (A taxi driver berated me for the West's focus on the crimes of the former Yugoslav dictator Slobodan Milosevic; Mengistu, he said, was responsible for at least twice as many deaths through his collectivization programs, but now lives in lavish exile in Zimbabwe.) In 1996, following a long series of town meetings, the Eritreans drafted what one foreign diplomat has called ``an impeccable constitution.'' But a second war with Ethiopia erupted in 1998, and the constitution has never been implemented. That war lasted until 2000; by some estimates it left 19,000 Eritreans and 60,000 Ethiopians dead, after tanks and fighter jets engaged in desert combat reminiscent of the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973. A U.S.-brokered ceasefire has resulted in the current demarcation of the disputed border under UN auspices. Since this latest war the very stubbornness and social discipline that continue to make Eritrea the most civil of societies, in ways rarely considered by Western journalists and policy elites, have also made it a pariah in Europe and the United States--and for good reason. In 2001 national elections were postponed indefinitely (though free and fair elections at the village level were under way at the time of my visit). Far more disturbing, though, is that Eritrea now has the worst press repression in Africa. And in a widespread government crackdown on political dissent, eleven high- ranking officials, nine journalists, several businessmen, and two Eritreans working for the political and economic sections of the U.S. embassy were arrested; they are still being held without charges. Moreover, a campaign of national mobilization requires young men and women to spend eighteen months in the military or the civil service: a good idea in principle, but they are often kept much longer, with no guaranteed release date. That, together with the political repression and the exceedingly slow pace of economic reform, has induced young people to quietly leave the country. An increasingly disaffected diaspora has refused to invest substantial amounts in Eritrea until conditions have been liberalized. ``We're not asking all that much,'' one foreign diplomat told me. ``They don't even have to hold national elections. If they would just implement a version of China's economic reforms, this place could bloom overnight, like Singapore, given its social control and small population.'' But several diplomats admitted that the sense of patriotism is so strong here, except among some of the urban elite in Asmara, that they detect no widespread unhappiness with the regime. ``The change would have to come at the top,'' one foreign resident told me. ``It's not altogether impossible that we will wake up tomorrow morning and learn that Isaias is no longer around.'' Another outside expert told me that he has not given up on the President, but if 2003 goes by without some political and economic reforms, he will consign Afewerki to the ranks of boorish African strongmen. My first interview with Afewerki was in 1986, in a cave in northern Eritrea, during the war with Ethiopia. That meeting had been scheduled for ten in the morning--and at ten exactly he walked in and said, ``You have questions for me?'' He hasn't changed. He was just as punctual when we met this time, and he spoke in the same blunt and remote tone, with the same shy asceticism. He spoke in intense, spare bursts of cold analysis--in contrast to the gasbag homilies one hears from many Arab and African politicians--for more than two hours. Afewerki may be the most intellectually interesting politician in the history of postcolonial Africa. ``All that we have achieved we did on our own,'' he said. ``But we have not yet institutionalized social discipline, so the possibility of chaos is still here. Remember, we have nine language groups and two religions. No one in Africa has succeeded in copying a Western political system, which took the West hundreds of years to develop. Throughout Africa you have either political or criminal violence. Therefore we will have to manage the creation of political parties, so that they don't become means of religious and ethnic division, like in Ivory Coast or Nigeria.'' He went on to say that China was on the right path--unlike Nigeria, with its 10,000 dead in communal riots since the return of democracy, in 1999. ``Don't morally equate the rights of Falun Gong with those of hundreds of millions of Chinese who have seen their lives dramatically improve,'' he told me. Yemen, Afewerki thinks, is ``a medievalist society and tribal jungle going through the long transition to modernity.'' He accused it of advancing an ``Arab national- security strategy against Israel,'' a country he openly supports. However, he accepted the international arbitration that awarded the disputed Hanish Islands, in the Red Sea, to Yemen. As for Ethiopia, he said it could fragment, because it is controlled by minority Tigreans who have created a Balkanized arrangement of ethnic groups (Amharas, Oromos, and so on) rather than trying to forge an imperial melting pot, in the way of Halle Selassie. Despite Afewerki's refreshing, undiplomatic brilliance, a few hours with him can be troubling. His very austerity, personal efficiency, and incorruptibility are mildly reminiscent of Mengistu himself (who also suffered from a seeming excess of pride), even though the latter was a mass murderer and Afewerki could yet turn out to be among Africa's most competent rulers. Civilization in the Home of Africa has often bred sharp political minds that, with cold efficiency, dealt with their intellectual enemies not through written attacks but by imprisoning or killing them. And it is said repeatedly in Asmara that the President has closed himself off since arresting the very people who challenged him intellectually. General Franks, on several visits here, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, during a visit last December, have held long talks with Afewerki. ``The meetings were superb,'' Afewerki told me. ``I mean that they were frank, without pretensions or flattery on either side. I share the strategic view of the Americans in the region. French forces in Djibouti have been a stabilizing factor, and U.S. troops will add to that. You need outside powers to keep order here. It sounds colonialist, but I am only being realistic.'' When I pressed Afewerki about human-rights abuses, which Rumsfeld had pointedly raised in their meeting two weeks earlier, he said, ``If you just leave us alone, we will handle these matters in a way that won't damage our bilateral relationship and won't embarrass us or you.'' He indicated that he would be more likely to satisfy U.S. demands on human rights in the context of a growing military partnership, but would not do so if merely hectored by the State Department. I worried that Afewerki, like many other realists, is obsessed with everything that could go wrong in his country rather than with what could go right. True realism requires a dose of idealism and optimism, or else policy becomes immobilized. And that might be Afewerki's problem. He seemed more comfortable when I first met him, in a state of wartime emergency, than he does now, in a state of peacetime possibility. He analyzes brilliantly what he knows, but he gives in to paranoia about what he doesn't know. He did not seem to understand that U.S. foreign policy is often a synthesis of what the State and Defense Departments are comfortable with, and that therefore Foggy Bottom alone cannot be blamed for Eritrea's image problems in the United States. Nevertheless, Afewerki has essentially offered the United States exactly what it wants: bases enabling its military to strike at anyone in the region at any time, without restrictions. Although the World Bank has questioned the economic viability of a new airport at Massawa with a long jet runway, Afewerki reportedly told Rumsfeld, ``The runway can handle anything the U.S. Air Force wants to land on it.'' Eritrea also boasts deepwater port facilities at Massawa and Assab, both strategically placed near the mouth of the Red Sea. Afewerki told me, ``The increasing social and economic marginalization of Africa will be a fact of life for a very long time to come.'' Ethiopia in particular, he said, will weaken internally as the Oromos and others demand more power. Its Tigrean Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi, already lives inside a vast security apparatus designed for his protection. Meanwhile, across the Red Sea in Yemen, not only water but oil, too, is running out even as the armed young population swells, potentially threatening the political order of significant parts of Arabia. And with fighting terrorism now a permanent strategic priority of the United States, the stability and discipline of Eritrea make it the perfect base for projecting American power and helping Israel in an increasingly unstable region. That, in turn, might foster the Singaporean kind of development for which, according to some, Eritrea appears suited. So there you have it: Yemen and Eritrea, two case studies in the war on terrorism. In Yemen the United States has to work with unsavory people in a tribalized society in order to prevent more-unsavory people from destabilizing it to the benefit of Osama bin Laden. In Eritrea the United States may have to use a bilateral military relationship to nudge the country's President toward prudent political and economic reform, so that Eritrea, too, won't be destabilized. Thus our military involvement with both nations will mean political involvement in their domestic affairs-and throughout the ages that has been the essence of imperialism.

Mr. BURTON of Indiana

Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Mr. Speaker, the right to self-determination is the essence of democracy. The lack of it is one reason that many of us here in Congress believe India falls short of a full-fledged democracy. In January 1949, India promised the United Nations that it would allow self-determination in Kashmir through a free and fair vote. It is now 2003 and this plebiscite has still not been held. India refuses to allow the Sikhs of Punjab, Khalistan, predominantly Christian Nagaland, Muslim Kashmir, and the other nations seeking their freedom from India to exercise their right to self determination through a free and fair vote, the democratic way, despite their claim that there is no support for independence. If not, why not just hold a vote and get the issue behind you? Instead of following the democratic principle of self-determination, India has tried to continue the subjugation of the Sikhs, Christians, Muslims, and other minorities through force. They have murdered over 250,000 Sikhs since 1984, over 200,000 Christians in Nagaland since 1947, over 85,000 Muslims in Kashmir since 1988, and tens of thousands of other minorities, including Assamese, Bodos, Dalits, Manipuris, and Tamils. A report from the Movement Against State Repression showed that India admitted to holding 52,268 Sikhs as political prisoners under the expired TADA law, one of the most repressive laws I know of. TADA expired in 1995. Some of these political prisoners have been held in illegal detention since 1984. According to Amnesty International, tens of thousands of other minorities, such as Christians, Muslims, and others, are also being held as political prisoners. How can a democratic country hold political prisoners? The State Department reported in 1994 that over 41,000 cash bounties were paid to police officers for killing Sikhs. They picked up human-rights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra after he exposed their practice of secret cremations and Mr. Khalra was killed in police custody. Independent investigations showed that the Indian government's forces carried out the massacre of 35 Sikhs in March 2000. Recently, the All India Christian Council reported that the government is sending out agents to seek intrusive information about Christians, such as whether they are first-generation Christians and how long they have been in India. This is happening in a country where American missionary Joseph Cooper was severely beaten and had to spend a week in the hospital, then was thrown out of the country for the crime of preaching. Australian missionary Graham Staines and his two sons were burned to death while they slept in their jeep by militant Hindu nationalists chanting ``Victory to Hannuman,'' a Hindu god. Priests have been murdered, nuns have been raped, churches have been burned, and schools and prayer halls have been violently attacked. A Christian festival was ended by police gunfire. Now two states, Gujarat and Tamil Nadu, have enacted laws prohibiting conversions to any religion except Hinduism. The survey of Christians is also occurring in Gujarat. Gujarat is the state where at least 2,000 and up to 5,000 Muslims were murdered last year, according to Indian newspapers. The press also reported that the government planned the attacks in advance. Mr. Speaker, the Council of Khalistan recently issued an open letter detailing these and other Indian government atrocities, repression, and violations of human rights. I urge everyone to read it. India has 18 official languages and it is not one nation. India must stop violating the human rights of minorities and instead follow democratic principles by allowing self-determination for all the minority nations that seek it. That is the only way to bring real freedom, peace, and stability to the region. Until then, the United States should stop its aid with India and Congress should put this country on record in support of self-determination. I would like to place the Council of Khalistan's open letter into the Record at this time, Mr. Speaker. It will be very informative to my colleagues and the people of this country. March 19, 2003. Open Letter to the Sikh Nation: Khalsa Panchayat Represents Sikh Nation and Deserves Our Support Akali Leadership and Jathedars Are Under Indian Government Control We must liberate Khalistan now. This is the only way for the Sikh Nation to prosper, progress, and project the Sikh religion and the interest of the Sikh Nation. Nations and religions without political power disappear. Our experience since 1947 has been very disappointing and repressive. Colonial rule was better for everyone in India except the Brahmins than Indian rule is. We have been victimized by repression, tyranny, discrimination, and other abuses of our basic, god-given rights. India has used genocide, murder, torture, rape, and everything in its arsenal to destroy the Sikh Nation. It has even blown up its own airliner to blame it on the Sikhs, as the book Soft Target, written by two Canadian journalists, proves beyond a doubt. They paid former Punjab governor Surendra Nath $1.5 billion to foment and support terrorism in Punjab and Kashmir. The present Sikh leadership is dishonest, corrupt, and completely under Indian control. They are complicit in the crimes of the Indian regime. The book Chakravyuh: Web of Indian Secularism by Professor Gurtej Singh shows their complicity. What a shame that they connived with the Indian government before the Golden Temple invasion to murder Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, General Shabeg Singh, and thousands of other good Sikhs who were working for Sikh freedom. Over 20,000 Sikhs were murdered in the attack on the Golden Temple and 38 other Sikh Gurdwaras throughout Punjab, Khalistan in June 1984. Another 20,000 were killed in the November 1984 massacres in Delhi and other cities. Overall, the Indian government, which boasts about being ``the world's largest democracy,'' has murdered over 250,000 Sikhs since 1984. The death sentence given to Professor Devinder Pal Singh Bhullar based on a false confession is the latest example of India's effort to eliminate the Sikh religion and intimidate the Sikh Nation. Indian police arrested human-rights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra after he exposed their policy of mass cremation of Sikhs, in which over 50,000 Sikhs have been picked up, tortured, and killed, then their bodies are declared unidentified and secretly cremated. Then Mr. Khalra was murdered in police custody. His body was not given to his family. Rajiv Singh Randhawa, the only witness to the Khalra kidnapping tried to give a petition to Jack Straw, then the British Home Minister and now its Foreign Minister, outside the Golden Temple in Amritsar. For this, he was arrested and tortured. Similarly, the police murdered former Jathedar of the Akal Takht Gurdev Singh Kaunke. His body was not handed over to his family. No one has been brought to justice for the Khalra kidnapping and murder. The murderer of Akal Takht Jathedar Gurdev Singh Kaunke, SSP Swaran Ghotna, has never been brought to trial. Nor have those who carried out the massacre of 35 Sikhs in Chithisinghpora three years ago this month. According to a report by the Movement Against State Repression (MASR), 52,268 Sikhs are being held as political prisoners in India without charge or trial. Some have been in illegal custody since 1984! Yet Chief Minister Amarinder Singh denies that there are any political prisoners at all. Have they murdered them all? Most of these political prisoners were taken into illegal custody under the Beant Singh regime, a Congress government. Can't Amarinder Singh find these records? Amarinder Singh should be commended for prosecuting corrupt government officials. Now he should keep his promise to prosecute Parkash Singh Badal and his family for their corruption during his tenure as Chief Minister. He sold government jobs for money. Services were only delivered after they received bribes. His wife Surinder Kaur is so experienced at this corrupt practice that she could tell the amount of money in a paper bag just by lifting it. What a shame for the Akali government! The Badal family has tarnished the pious Akali name of the first half of the last century. That Sikh leadership gave sacrifices for the glory of the Khalsa Panth. The Indian regime paid over 41,000 cash bounties to police officers for killing Sikhs, according to a 1994 report from the U.S. State Department. One of these bounties was paid to a policeman who killed a three-year-old boy! In another case, a man brought suit because he had been listed as having been killed in one of these incidents but was actually alive. Who was murdered in his place? The legs of the driver for Baba Charan Singh were tied to two jeeps which drove off in opposite directions and he was torn in half. An attorney in Ropar who defended Sikh youth was picked up along with his wife and his two-year-old son. They were made to ``disappear'' just like 50,000 other Sikhs. The Indian Supreme Court called the Indian government's murders of Sikhs ``worse than a genocide.'' On October 7, 1987, the Sikh Nation declared the independence of its homeland, Punjab, Khalistan. No Sikh representative has ever signed the Indian constitution. The Sikh nation has awakened. I call on all Sikhs to support the Khalsa Panchayat. These good Sikhs forced Jathedar Manjit Singh of Kesgarh to resign. Now Jathedar Vedanti must resign along with him. Please help the Khalsa Panchayat in these efforts. And work to build a party that will lead a Shantmai Morcha to liberate our homeland, Khalistan, from Indian occupation. Just as the Akalis took control from the Mahants of the last century, we must take control of our future from the new Mahants, the present Akali leadership and Indian-controlled Jathedars. India is on the verge of disintegration. Khalistan will soon be free. Home Minister L.K. Advani said that if Kashmir goes, India goes. The Kashmir problem has been internationalized. The only way to solve the Kashmir problem is to have a referendum where the Kashmiri people can decide their own future. With self-determination, the Kashmiri people will either be independent or go with Pakistan. Either way, Kashmir is going to go. As soon as Kashmir goes, Khalistan will be independent within a year. We can achieve freedom much earlier if our leadership is not under Indian control and they are sincere and honest. Only in a free Khalistan will the Sikh Nation prosper. Only then will the Sikh Nation get justice. India must start acting like a democracy and allow self-determination in the form of a free and fair plebiscite on independence for Punjab, Khalistan and the other nations seeking their freedom from India. Let us join hands to secure our freedom, for ourselves and future generations. Sincerely, Dr. Gurmit Singh Aulakh, President, Council of Khalistan.

Mr. BURTON of Indiana

Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Mr. Speaker, today the House considered H. Res. 113, a resolution that recognizes the scope of child abuse and neglect and declares support for efforts to raise public awareness of this tragic problem. I wholeheartedly support H. Res. 113 for several reasons. Approximately 3 million cases of suspected or known child abuse and neglect involving 5 million American children occur each year. The actual incidence of abuse and neglect is estimated to be 3 times greater than then number reported to authorities. This social problem results in human and economic costs due to its relationship to crime, delinquency, drug and alcohol abuse, domestic violence, and welfare dependency. As a child growing up in Indiana, I personally experienced the horrors of child abuse in my own family. Children in abusive homes have very few options to improve their situations. I believe that the public needs to be better educated about the effects of abuse. It is important that children living in abusive homes know that there are people and organizations available to help them. Children shouldn't have to live in fear of abuse. The law should be there to protect them, and when it doesn't we should take steps to ensure their safety. H. Res. 113 recognizes the need for better public awareness of the tragedy of child abuse. I urge my colleagues to continue to promote awareness of this tragic problem.

Mr. BURTON of Indiana

Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Mr. Speaker, in the late 1980s, Congress passed a bill that established a Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund. It was supposed to be a nonadversarial fund that was to help children and their parents when they were damaged by vaccines. We have found in the last few years that we have had a tremendous increase in the number of autistic children in America. We went from 1 in 10,000 children who are autistic to 1 in 200; and now many scientists and doctors around the world and in the United States believe it has been caused by mercury in vaccines. There is a product in vaccines called thimerosal; and 50 percent of thimerosal, which is a preservative in vaccines, is mercury. Mercury causes damage to the neurologic system and to the brain; and yet we have been putting it in needles and then into our kids for many, many years, mercury which has a cumulative effect in the brain and does cause things like autism and other neurological disorders. Most parents do not know that. When we established this fund in the late 1980s, there was a 3-year window when people could file if their children had been damaged by vaccines. Many parents with autistic children did not know about the fund until the 3 years had elapsed. We are trying to get that changed so these thousands and thousands of parents with autistic children have the opportunity to apply to that fund to get the kind of restitution that they need to take care of their kids. Many parents have gone bankrupt, have lost their homes, have had to take extra mortgages to help with their problems, and the children are never going to be completely right. If Members saw the movie Rainman, Members know what I am talking about. Mr. Speaker, each night I am coming to the floor and reading one of the thousands of letters I get from parents who have no place to turn except to the Congress. This lady who wrote this letter is named Melinda Clark from Parma, Missouri. Here is what she writes: ``My family's journey down this road began a little over 3 years ago. The day of my son's diagnosis is permanently etched in my mind. I stood there frozen in the doctor's office almost as if time stood still, and I was instantly put on autopilot. It is still painful to go back to that time in my mind. It finally explained why my precious little boy no longer uttered my name or even looked into my eyes. Oh, how I longed to hear the words 'I love you,' but those were not going to come easily. It would take numerous hours of intense therapy to put together any sounds. With our backs against the wall, we immediately immersed ourselves into research and getting therapy treatment under way. While most kids his age enjoyed leisure time playing with toys and watching Sesame Street, my son began a time-intensive schedule of 40 hours a week of combined therapies. We started from scratch and had to first learn what exactly Nicholas knew and then work from there to fill in many gaps. ``As our research continued, I was quick to discover the use of thimerosal in many of my son's vaccines. Nicholas received his vaccines from both the county health department as well as the doctor's office. All in all, too much thimerosal was accumulated for his fragile immunity and nervous system. My investigation has been thwarted by the doctor's office from the beginning. As I began to put together pieces and find proof for my well-founded fears of mercury poisoning in my son, I requested the specific lot numbers as well as manufacturers' names for his vaccines in order to file a vaccine injury report. The doctor's office effectively stalled me for many months before finally telling me that no specific records had been maintained. I could not believe my ears. This was their legal, not to mention ethical, obligation to their patients' safety and welfare. Without this specific information, I was never able to officially report the injury, but it is my sincere hope that through this letter my story can be told. Nothing can be done to undo the damage done to my son, but I pray that no other family will have to suffer at the hands of our ignorant use of mercury in these vaccines. What sickens me even more is I worked in an environmental lab where we would test for this toxin in parts per billion, and no one ever mentioned to me during my son's vaccines that this toxin was being used as preservative. As an intelligent human being, if given the opportunity and knowledge of being told this chemical was contained in his vaccines, I never would have allowed this poison to be injected into my child. Then it goes on and tells how horrible it was as she saw her child slip away from her and does not pay attention or look at her any more. It is difficult for those who are not personally affected to understand or even acknowledge the truth. We have been trained from early on to trust in our government and follow all the guidelines set forth for vaccine safety. Like many others, I used to have that trust. Now my vision has been greatly blurred as the blame and acceptance of this issue has been set aside time and again. It is time for our country to step forward and do what is right. No other family should have to walk this stony path when it can easily be avoided by the complete removal of all mercury in all vaccines. The monetary loss of dumping these vaccines is a small price to pay. My son is now 6, and he is doing as well as anyone can expect. Mr. Speaker, there are thousands of these children who have been damaged by mercury in vaccines, and here are a few pictures of some of these children. We need to adjust the Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund to take care of these kids. We cannot leave them and their parents high and dry. It is absolutely criminal for this Congress not to deal with this issue.

Mr. BURTON of Indiana

Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Mr. Speaker and my colleagues, these are the faces of children who have been vaccinated with childhood vaccines that contain a substance called thimerosal. Thousands and thousands and thousands, probably millions of children, but thousands of children have been adversely affected by the thimerosal, which is 50 percent mercury; and these are the faces of children who were normal one day, and after receiving several shots in one day that contained mercury, they very rapidly deteriorated to where they could not talk, they could not look one in the eye, they would flap their arms and run around screaming, and they had chronic constipation and diarrhea alternatively. These parents of these children and thousands more like them have had a similar experience to my daughter and my grandson. He received nine shots in one day, seven of which contained mercury. He got 40 times the amount of mercury that is tolerable in an adult in 1 day, and within 2 days he was autistic. A very normal child like these were normal children. He was a very happy child, a very talkative child, and he went into silence. When we started getting him out of it finally, he could not talk clearly. He had to have all kinds of speech therapy. He ran around on his toes, flapping his arms, banging his head against the wall like all of these children did. And scientists that we have had before our committee and doctors from throughout the world who are very competent have said that in large part that was caused because by the mercury that was injected into these children from the preservative called thimerasol which was in almost all of the children's vaccinations until just the last 2 or 3 years when we had hearings on this, and, thankfully, most of those vaccines no longer have mercury in them except maybe one which is the flu vaccine for children. So, Mr. Speaker, if any parents would be watching this, I would like for them to remember to very quickly and very thoroughly look at the insert in the vaccination case when their children are vaccinated and make sure that they do not have an adverse reaction. The reason I am bringing this up and I am coming down here every night is because there is an attempt by the pharmaceutical companies through Members of Congress to eliminate any possibility of lawsuits against them caused by these vaccinations which had mercury in them. We have what is called the Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund, which was supposed to be a nonadversarial procedure to compensate these people for damage to their children caused by vaccines; but it has become very adversarial, and it was only a 3-year period within which people had to file. That 3-year period passed before many of these people knew that they could try to get compensation for their child's damage; and as a result, they were left out in the cold. So they filed a class action lawsuit, and there has been an attempt last fall and again this year they are going to attempt to stop those class action lawsuits which would leave these parents out in the cold with no recourse. They are mortgaging their homes. They are going bankrupt. They have no place to go. There is a fund set up to help them, but they cannot get into the fund because that statute has run out and they cannot even go to court to file a class action lawsuit if this language that is in the Senate bill right now is passed into law; and that simply is wrong. We created that fund so those people, those children, could be compensated. I want to read a letter of a former colleague of ours, Dick Chrysler, who was a Member of this Chamber who has a grandson who is 6 years old that is autistic. He received several vaccinations in the 1997-1999 period, many of which contained the mercury, and here is what his mother said: ``He then continued to regress from being alert and happy and beginning to talk to total regression and not talking until after age 3 with speech therapy. He also became a very aggressive child who did not know how to play or interact properly with others.'' That is what happened to my grandson as well. ``These and many other much more severe behaviors such as seizures with severe breakdowns and explosive behaviors which have caused injury to our other children from broken bones to stitches have become a part of our life due to autism. This has made our life incredibly difficult as one can imagine. As we have taken this past year and a half focusing on whatever treatments we can do to help our son's autism improve and therefore our family's life as well, it has cost us more than we could ever have imagined. Treatments, which have helped but are not covered by any insurance, have amounted to thousands of dollars, and this expense has no end in sight.'' Remember, there is a fund out there that they cannot get into. They cannot go to court, and yet the vaccines, they believe, and thousands like them believe, and I believe, and scientists and doctors believe it was caused by the mercury in these vaccines. Autism does not just affect the poor thousands of children inflicted with this dreadful disease. It affects every person in the world, since ultimately this epidemic is like a chain reaction. They go on to say 10 to 20 years from now when these are not just little children, who is going to take care of them, especially when we die? This is something that my colleagues and I have to deal with, and we have to deal with it quickly.

Mr. BURTON of Indiana

Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Mr. Speaker, it used to be that one child in 10,000 was autistic. Now it is one in 200. We have had a 50-fold increase in the number of children that are autistic in this country. It is an absolute epidemic. One of the causes, according to leading scientists around the world, is the mercury that was in children's vaccines. Mercury, can we believe that, being in a child's vaccine? It is toxic to the brain, it causes neurological disorders, and yet we have been using it as a preservative for years and years and years. One of the things that I am very concerned about is that many of the parents who have autistic children missed the 3-year statute of limitations to file for money to help with their child's damaged brain because they did not even know their child was damaged by mercury, and the thimerosal in these vaccines until the 3-year statute of limitations had expired. Now, there has been legislation proposed at various times, especially last year in the homeland security bill, which would have eliminated any possibility of those people going to court to get satisfaction for their child's damaged brain. Their child is ruined for life, and they cannot get into the Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund, so there is no recourse. Mr. Speaker, there is legislation that I have sponsored this year and legislation that Senator Frist has sponsored in the other body that will deal with this problem. But we have to make absolutely sure that the legislation does open up the process so that these parents will have an opportunity to participate in the Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund, which has $1.8 billion in it right now. Now, every night I am going to be coming down here reading letters from these parents who have had damaged children. I have thousands of them. It is extremely important that my colleagues and people across this country know what has been going on. Here is a letter from a lady named Mary Cutler from Brick, New Jersey. She said, ``Shortly after my son received his second and third rounds of DTP/Hib at 5 months and 7 months of age and then hepatitis B at 9 months of age, he began to be continually sick with ear infections and diarrhea and was late on meeting his milestones. After he received his first MMR shot at age 15 months, he began to head bang and wake up during the night. ``It was not until 2000 when I came across a report on thimerosal in vaccines and the comparison of the symptoms of mercury poisoning and autism did I find a true answer. My son has been tested. Mercury was found in his body and he has been undergoing chelation treatment for mercury poisoning. We test his urine often and after 2 years of chelation, there is still mercury coming out of his body.'' Mercury that in all probability was put in by these shots that children get before they go to school. ``He has since made and continues to make steady improvements,'' but there is still mercury in him and it is coming out. ``He became more and more verbal,'' and so and so forth. She ends up by saying, ``All of this has come at a great cost, both financially,'' and they have heavy credit debt and they have had to take out second and third mortgages on their home, ``and emotionally to our family. My husband and I have not had a night out or a vacation in years or even been able to get a babysitter. ``Since we did not find out about the vaccine thimerosal ingredient until 2000, the 3-year limitation rule has put us outside the statute of limitations for the current Vaccine Injury Compensation Act. We hope someday our son may live a normal life, but it is a constant worry as to what will happen to him as we age and/or die and we are no longer able to take care of him. The money that autism costs to families and society at large in terms of special education, Social Security, disability, et cetera cannot be ignored or hidden from the general public. Thimerosal/mercury is a known neurotoxin and that the vaccine manufacturers could use it at all and that they still use it especially without looking at the cumulative effects on babies is unconscionable and must be addressed so it does not happen again.'' Mr. Speaker, we need to reopen the Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund with a look-back provision for at least 1 year or 18 months so these families will have some recourse. They are losing their homes, they are going bankrupt, there are divorces being caused because they have no recourse and there is nothing they can do about their child's damaged brain. Our society and the pharmaceutical companies that had thimerosal in these vaccines should bear a responsibility, and that is why the Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund, which was designed to protect the pharmaceutical companies as well as to provide a nonadversarial procedure so parents could get financial assistance for their damaged children who were damaged by vaccines, that we need to make sure that it is open to these people who have damaged children, who have been damaged through the mercury that is in the childhood vaccines. Children get 26 vaccines before they go to school, vaccinations. Many of them, many of them become autistic. It has gone, as I said before, from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 200. This is something our government and our society can no longer ignore. We must hold the pharmaceutical companies accountable. We can do that with the kind of legislation we have been talking about; that is, to open up the Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund for those families who missed that 3-year window of opportunity. This is something we cannot forget. We must get on with it. Here are a few pictures of some of these kids that have been damaged.

Mr. BURTON of Indiana

Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Madam Speaker, a few minutes ago, the majority and the minority leaders of the House, or the minority whip and the majority leader of the House, discussed the Amber Alert System and how important it was that we do everything we can to protect our American children. This lectern, or this stand, holds the faces of about 55 or 60 children who have been damaged, their parents believe, by vaccines that contain mercury and they have become autistic. One of those is my grandson. It is very interesting, Madam Speaker, that today we found out that there is a just-published report in the ``Journal of the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons'' that involves a research study on autism. The research, conducted by Drs. Mark Geier and David Geier, analyzed mercury doses children received from thimerosal, which contains mercury in childhood vaccines in comparison to Federal safety guidelines. The doctors concluded that mercury from thimerosal did exceed Federal safety guidelines and that the study provides strong epidemiological evidence for a link between increasing mercury from thimerosal-containing childhood vaccines and neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism which has reached epidemic proportions. The authors stated, ``A causal relationship between thimerosal-containing childhood vaccines and neurodevelopmental disorders appears to be confirmed.'' The Geier research confirms the findings of an unreleased CDC study, Centers for Disease Control, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, which found a relative risk of 2.48 between thimerosal exposures and autism. Courts of law have generally held that a relative risk of 2.0 or higher is sufficient to substantiate that a given exposure causes diseases. So there is no doubt, no doubt, that the mercury that has been injected into our children is a cause, a contributing cause at the very least, but a cause, of the autism that these children are suffering. I have asked the parents of these children from across the country to write to me, to give me information on how their child became autistic and how close it was to when the child was vaccinated with vaccines containing mercury. We had a big problem in the last session. Right at the end in the homeland security bill, there was an amendment stuck in at the 11th hour which took away any liability that the pharmaceutical companies might incur because of mercury-related damage done to children. We were able to get that out early this session. But now in the other body they are trying to put that back in in a bill that was introduced today by the majority leader. That is something that is intolerable. It is something that cannot be tolerated by this body or the other body. I want to tell you why real quickly. Here is one example, a letter from a lady named Sue McManus from Kennesaw, Georgia. She says: ``Eight years ago, in 1994, I adopted a lovely daughter, Jessica, from Paraguay at age 5 months. Jessica was not identified as a special needs child at the time of adoption and was in fact seen by pediatricians in Paraguay who were U.S. trained as well as in this country and given a clean bill of health. Being a responsible parent and following directions from my doctors, I had her vaccinated within a few weeks of bringing her home. On 11/15/94, she received OPV, DPT, HIB and hepatitis B. On January 17, 1995, she received her second series of shots. Within 4 hours of the second series of shots, she reacted with severe infantile spasm seizures and she became autistic. She had three seizures that week and had never had any form of seizure prior to the second shot. Per medical recommendation, she received several shots that day. I don't have any doubt that my daughter reacted severely and directly as a result of this DPT shot or combination of shots.'' She goes on to say that ``she has not developed normally, she has become autistic, she stares at the walls, she flaps her arms like my grandson does and she has chronic diarrhea or constipation and it is a problem that will not go away.'' If you saw the movie ``Rain Man,'' you know how bad autism can be. If we do not deal with this problem now, we are going to deal with it in 15 to 20 years when these people all become dependent on society. Let me just say to my colleagues, this is something this House is going to have to address. It is not a partisan issue. Both Democrats and Republicans have said they want to protect America's children. The President said he does not want to leave any children behind. These kids are being left behind and their parents are being saddled with $50,000, $100,000, $200,000 bills. They are selling their homes, they are going bankrupt to take care of their children, and the people who are responsible for the damage to them, the pharmaceutical companies, are being left high and dry with no damage whatsoever being attributed to them. There is a responsibility here for this government to make sure these children are treated properly. In the next few weeks I am going to be reading every night letters from these parents talking about how their child was damaged and in what proximity it was to the shots they received containing mercury. We can no longer turn our backs on this. We went from one in 10,000 children who are autistic to one in 150 right now. It is an absolute epidemic. We cannot sweep it under the rug.

Mr. BURTON of Indiana

Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Mr. Speaker, Devinder Singh Pal Bhullar faces the death penalty. He should be spared. His pending execution shows that the Indian constitution only protects the Hindu majority. Bhullar was accused of being involved in a 1993 bombing near the offices of the Youth Congress in Delhi. 20 people were killed in that blast and Congress leader M.S. Bitta lost a leg. This might be a justifiable sentence for such a crime except for a few small details. Mr. Bhullar was found ``not guilty'' by the presiding judge of a three-judge panel from India's Supreme Court. The judge directed that he be released. Apparently, that was not acceptable to the fundamentalist Hindu nationalist regime. So they tortured him to coerce him into signing a false confession which was subsequently retracted. Yet they are executing him on the basis of this forced confession. This is offensive to anyone with a sense of justice. Mr. Speaker. This is not the way a democratic country does things. It is how criminal cases are handled in such models of democracy as Red China and Iraq. Meanwhile, Sajjan Kumar and H.K.L. Bhagat, the officials responsible for inciting the murders of thousands of Sikhs in Delhi, have never been brought to justice. Unfortunately, this is typical of how India treats its minorities. Last year in Gujarat 2,000 to 5,000 Muslims were murdered by militant Hindu nationalists while police, under orders, stood by and did nothing. No one has been punished for this atrocity. Now police in Gujarat are demanding very intrusive information about Christians there. Meanwhile, two states have enacted laws prohibiting religious conversions--except to Hinduism, of course. Police have murdered over a quarter of a million Sikhs, over 200,000 Christians in Nagaland, over 85,000 Muslims in Kashmir, and tens of thousands of Assamese, Bodos, Dalit ``untouchables,'' Manipuris, Tamils, and other minorities. Indian forces were caught red-handed in a village in Kashmir trying to set fire to the Sikh Gurdwara and some homes there. Two studies have shown that Indian forces carried out the massacre of 35 Sikhs in Chithisinghpora three years ago this month. Missionary Graham Staines and his two sons were murdered by being burned to death in their jeep while the killers surrounded the jeep and chanted ``Victory to Hannuman.'' Missionary Joseph Cooper was severely beaten and had to spend a week in the hospital. Then he was expelled from the country for preaching. The widow of Mr. Staines was also expelled from India. Christian churches have been burned and schools and prayer halls have been violently attacked with impunity. There have been priests murdered and nuns raped. In 1995, Indian police picked up human-rights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra did a study of cremation grounds in Punjab which showed that thousands of Sikhs have been picked up, tortured, murdered, then declared ``unidentified'' and secretly cremated. For his efforts, Khalra was picked up by the police and murdered while in police custody. More than 52,000 Sikhs sit in jail as political prisoners without charge or trial. The time has come to stop our aid to India. We should also support the self-determination to which all peoples and nations are entitled. This is the only way to end atrocities such as these and to ensure peace, freedom, stability, and prosperity in South Asia. Mr. Speaker, I would like to place the Council of Khalistan's outstanding press release on the Bhullar case into the Record. Devinder Pal Singh Bhullar's Life Must Be Spared minorities eliminated, directly or by courts Washington, DC, Feb. 25, 2003.--The impending execution of Devinder Pal Singh Bhullar shows that the Constitution of India only protects the majority Hindu population, according to Dr. Gurmit Singh Aulakh, President of the Council of Khalistan, which leads the Sikh struggle for independence from India. Dr. Aulakh called on the President of India to stop the execution. Bhullar was accused of a 1993 bomb blast near the Youth Congress office in Delhi in which 20 people were killed. Congress leader M.S. Bitta lost a leg in that attack. The presiding Judge of a three-Judge bench in the Supreme Court of India found Professor Bhullar, a political activist, ``Not Guilty'' and directed that he be released. However, Professor Bhullar was convicted based on a forced confession obtained through torture, which was retracted. On that basis India wants to impose capital punishment on Professor Bhullar. Sajjan Kumar and H.K.L. Bhagat, who personally incited the murder of thousands of Sikhs in Delhi, go off scot-free without any punishment. Even by Indian standards, this is an outrageous miscarriage of justice. ``The Bhullar case is merely the latest example of how India eliminates minorities,'' said Dr. Aulakh. Indian police arrested human-rights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra after he exposed their policy of mass cremation of Sikhs, in which over 50,000 Sikhs have been picked up, tortured, and killed, then their bodies are declared unidentified and secretly cremated. Then Mr. Khalra was murdered in police custody. His body was not given to his family. Similarly, the police murdered former Jathedar of the Akal Takht Gurdev Singh Kaunke. His body was not handed over to his family. Last spring the Indian police stood aside under orders while militant Hindus murdered 2,000 to 5,000 Muslims in Gujarat. Australian missionary Graham Staines was murdered a few years ago by VHP activists. Staines and his two young sons were burned to death while they slept in their jeep. Their killers surrounded the jeep and chanted ``Victory to Hannuman,'' a Hindu god. After the murder, Staines' widow, who was working with lepers, was expelled from India. No one was ever punished for these atrocities. Nuns have been raped, priests have been murdered, and Christian churches have been burned by the fanatic, fundamentalist Hindu nationalist militants. ``It is clear from these actions that India is not the democracy it claims to be,'' said Dr. Aulakh. ``Instead it is a tyrannical Hindu theocracy where minorities die or disappear,'' he said. ``There is a consistent pattern of Indian government efforts to protect its tyrannical rule over the minorities of South Asia.'' The Indian government has murdered over 250,000 Sikhs since 1984, more than 200,000 Christians since 1948, over 85,000 muslims in Kashmir since 1988, and tens of thousands of Tamils, Assamese, Manipuris, Dalits (the aboriginal people of the subcontinent), and others. More than 52,000 Sikhs are being held as political prisoners. The Indian Supreme Court called the Indian government's murders of Sikhs ``worse than a genocide.'' On October 7, 1987, the Sikh Nation declared the independence of its homeland, Punjab, Khalistan. No Sikh representative has ever signed the Indian constitution. The Council of Khalistan is the government pro tempore of Khalistan, the Sikh homeland. The Sikh Nation demands freedom for its homeland, Khalistan. ``Only in a free and sovereign Khalistan will the Sikh Nation prosper. In a democracy, the right to self- determination is the sine qua non and India should allow a plebiscite for the freedom of the Sikh Nation and all the nations of South Asia,'' Dr. Aulakh said.

Mr. BURTON of Indiana

Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Mr. Speaker, I have with me today a box, and on this box I am not sure my colleagues can see this, but there is 50 to 100 pictures of children who are autistic, and in the box I have in back of my office I have probably close to 1,000 letters from parents who have autistic children who believe their children became autistic because they received vaccinations that contained mercury. We all know mercury is a toxic substance, and we know that we should not have it around us, but we have, as a matter of fact, been vaccinating our children with many micrograms of mercury in each vaccination for probably the last 20 years, and as we increase the number of vaccines that the children were being inoculated with, the amount of mercury that they were being confronted with went up as well, and as a result, we have gone from one in 10,000 children who are autistic to one in 200 children that are autistic. That is a fifty-fold increase. Soon what I am going to be doing, Mr. Speaker, is each night I am going to be coming down here and reading to the American people and my colleagues letters from these families telling of their child becoming autistic, when it happened and how it happened so that my colleagues and the American people will really know what is going on. Many of the pharmaceutical companies do not want this to happen because they are concerned about the liability that they might incur. We have what is called the Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund, which if handled properly could deal with most of these children and their families, but unfortunately, the Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund, which was created not only to protect the pharmaceutical companies but to help these children in a nonadversarial way by getting money to take care of their damaged bodies and minds, has not been administered properly, but we are working on that now. Until we get a resolution of that problem, we will be down here every night or every other night reading these letters. This is a letter from a man named Scott Bono and his wife is Laura Bono, and they tell about their child and how their child became autistic after he received vaccines. Now they have done a mercury toxicity test on their son which shows that he has quite a bit of mercury in his body, and the way he got that mercury into his body was through these vaccinations. They say in this letter, ``When Jackson was first diagnosed with Pervasive Developmental Disorder at 20 months old, he had just experienced a four-month regression beginning days after his August 9, 1990 shots. He received HiB shot, with 25 micrograms of mercury, on July 25.'' And 2-weeks later he received on August 9 a DT shot with 25 micrograms of mercury in it. He had received, prior to that, 75 micrograms of mercury from other shots, and the boy became autistic shortly thereafter. The parents were not aware of and did not get their child into what was called the Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund, which has a 3-year statute of limitations, which means that if they did not get into it within 3 years of finding out he was autistic and they believe the cause was vaccines that they could not get into the fund. We have thousands of families that were not aware of the Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund, who never applied, and those people have been left out in the cold. Let me tell my colleagues the results of just this one family's problem. Since he became autistic, their medical expenses have cost $578,980. Their insurance companies have paid $306,000 of that, but including food and everything else that they are providing for this boy for his special needs, it is costing them $35,000 in after tax dollars to take care of this child, and when we add all this up, it is over $600,000 in medical needs and therapy and food for this boy. Actually, they are in a very difficult financial situation because of that. We have families that have sold their homes, have gone bankrupt, have borrowed money until they are about to go bankrupt to take care of their children's needs, and those people are confident, as I am, that their child was damaged by the mercury in these vaccines. So, Mr. Speaker, we have got to do something about that. We have to either change the Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund to allow these people to get in there where their child and his problem is going to be reviewed by a special master, and if there is merit to their claim, this Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund should take care of that. If we do not get that, then the next thing we ought to do is allow them to be able to go to court to sue the pharmaceutical companies. In any event, Mr. Speaker, I will be back here tomorrow night and I appreciate the Chair being liberal with his time. We have got to solve these problems for these kids. We cannot leave them out in the cold. The President said he was going to leave no child behind, and we should not leave these children behind.

Mr. BURTON of Indiana

Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Mr. Speaker, there has been a lot of misinformation going around about our good friend, Saddam Hussein, and I think that the American people as well as my colleagues need to know really what is going on, because a lot of people have not been paying attention to this. For the past decade, Saddam Hussein has violated 16 separate U.N. resolutions. He has failed to account for 26,500 artillery rockets used for delivering nerve gas; he has failed to account for 5,000 artillery shells filled with mustard gas; he has failed to account for more than 3,000 tons of chemicals that could be used as weapons; and he has failed time and time again to honor his agreement on the no-fly zone. Mr. Speaker, he has enough biological agents to produce 26,000 liters of anthrax, 26,000 liters, 1,200 liters of botulinum toxin, and a whole bunch of others. He has tried to procure uranium for nuclear weaponry, and he has failed to account for nearly 30,000 empty munitions that could be filled with chemical agents. Yet, there are so many people, after all of these violations, who keep saying, we ought to wait, we ought to wait, we ought to wait. He is connected to the terrorist network. If we are not very careful, if we do not deal with him very quickly, he is going to produce these biological and chemical weapons, he is going to give them to one of his minions in al Qaeda or some other terrorist organization, they are going to come into the United States, and they are going to kill tens or hundreds of thousands of Americans. That is why we need to deal with him very, very expeditiously. One of the things that concerns me so much is that we do not profit from history. Back in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Hitler, the Chancellor of Germany, said time and again that he wanted peace and he did not want to violate any neutrality treaties, and yet he violated the Treaty of Versailles. He went into the Sudetenland and got an agreement from the European allies and said that that was all he wanted. And then he went into Poland after violating a nonagression pact. And then he went into Denmark, and then he went into Norway, and then he went into Sweden, and then he went into Belgium, and then he went into Paris and France. And because the world did not pay attention to what was going on and they did not listen to Winston Churchill, who was the only voice who made any sense, 50 million people died. I want everybody to listen to that: 50 million people died because they did not pay any attention to what Hitler was saying and what he was doing. Now, Saddam Hussein has at his disposal weapons of mass destruction, and he has hidden them for the past 10 to 12 years; and he has not accounted for them. For us and the Free World to keep our heads in the sand while this is going on is absolutely incredulous. The President of the United States is doing the right thing. The only thing I would say to the President is if the United Nations does not start forcing him to adhere, Saddam to adhere to those U.N. resolutions, then why talk to them anymore? Mr. President, do what is necessary. Take our troops and invade Iraq from the north and the south, if possible, get rid of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction, and send a signal to the world and the terrorists worldwide that we are not going to tolerate them. Do not mess with the U.N. anymore, Mr. President, because they simply are not with it.

Mr. BURTON of Indiana

Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Mr. Speaker, due to an unavoidable conflict in my schedule, I was unable to be present during rollcall votes 37-39. Had I voted, I would have voted ``no'' on rollcall votes 37-38, and ``yea'' on rollcall vote 39.

Mr. BURTON of Indiana

Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Mr. Speaker, I offer a resolution (H. Res. 98), and I ask unanimous consent for its immediate consideration.

Mr. BURTON of Indiana

Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me the time. I have not read this book ``Captive Warriors'' yet, but I am going to read it. I have known the gentleman for many years, and I have never been able to get out of him a lot of the things that happened to him in Vietnam, but I want him to know that from other people I have learned that he really is a hero, and he is a credit not only to the service of this country, the armed services, but he is a credit to this House as well. One of the proudest things that I can say about being a Member of Congress is, Sam Johnson is my friend.

Mr. BURTON of Indiana

Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Mr. Speaker, ``during rollcall votes 15, 16, and 17, I was unavoidably absent. Had I been here I would have voted ``yea'' on rollcall vote 15 and ``no'' on rollcall vote 16 and 17.

Mr. BURTON of Indiana

Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Mr. Speaker, while we were in recess, a law was passed in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu by the Hindu fundamentalist government there that bans religious conversions to any religion but Hinduism. The Washington Times did an excellent report on this bill in its issue of November 11. According to the article, the bill ``penalizes those who convert to a religion other than Hinduism with imprisonment and a hefty fine.'' The ruling BJP and its coalition partners, as well as one of its sister organizations, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), have endorsed this bill and called for similar bills to be passed all over the country. The militant Hindu nationalists claim that people are being converted by force. However, as John Dayal, secretary-general of the All-India Christian Council in New Delhi, said, ``In fact, the only inducements by fraud and fear are those being carried out by [Hindu organizations] in the tribal belt, where innocent tribals are being forced to become Hindus.'' A Cabinet members was quoted several months ago as saying that everyone who lives in India must be a Hindu or be subservient to Hindus. This is the reality of Indian democracy, Mr. Speaker. India must start acting like a democracy. 52,268 Sikhs political prisoners and tens of thousands of other political prisoners being held in India must be released. Since 1984, over 250,000 Sikhs have been murdered by the Indian government. The Indian regime has also killed over 85,000 Kashmiri Muslims since 1988, over 200,000 Christians in Nagaland, and tens of thousands of other minorities, including Assamese, Bodos, Dalits, Manipuris, and Tamils, among others. Last spring, 2,000 to 5,000 Muslims were murdered in Gujarat with the connivance and support of the police. In November, the government of Pakistan issued 400 visas to Sikhs to come and celebrate the birthday of one of the Sikh Gurus, Guru Nanak. India only let 48 Sikhs to the celebration. Why are American taxpayers being asked to support this theocratic regime? It is time to cut off our aid to India, and it is time to support the American principles of freedom, democracy, peace, and stability by openly and publicly supporting self-determination for all the peoples and nations of South Asia, such as Khalistan, Kashmir, Nagalim, and others, through a free and fair plebiscite. This will show India's commitment to being a true democracy rather than a Hindu theocracy. Mr. Speaker, I would like to place the Washington Times article on the anti-conversion ordinance into the Record at this time for the information of my colleagues. [From the Washington Times, Nov. 11, 2002] Low-Caste Hindus Eye New Religions (By Shaikh Azizur Rahman) New Delhi.--Low-caste Hindus in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu are threatening to embrace Christianity, Buddhism or Islam to protest a new law that outlaws religious conversion. A bill passed into law by the state legislature last month penalizes those who convert to a religion other than Hinduism with imprisonment and a hefty fine. While religious minorities in Tamil Nadu plan to challenge the law in court, many Hindus from so-called ``untouchable castes,'' known as Dalits, are threatening to publicly defy the new law. One group of Dalit Hindus in the state capital, Chennai, said that a group of 10,000 will convert to Buddhism on Dec. 6 if the law is not revoked. Another group, known as the Dalit Panthers of India [DPI), pledged that 25,000 of its members would become Christians to protest what they called an ``unjustified'' decree. ``The upper class has been torturing the Dalits for centuries, and now, by passing the bill, the government has decided to shackle us in a society where we are denied even our basic democratic rights,'' said one Dalit activist, who identified himself by the Christian name Emmanuel. On Oct. 31, Tamil Nadu became the first--but probably not the last--Indian state to outlaw religious conversions. Though the law targets conversions ``by force, allurement or fraudulent means,'' opponents say the language offers the means to challenge all conversions to faiths other than Hinduism. ``Even if one changes one's religion of one's own free will, those involved in the conversion can be punished on the ground that it's a case of forced conversion,'' said M. Karunanidhi a former chief minister of Tamil Nadu. The new law was welcomed by Hindu fundamentalists, who govern the nation in a coalition led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). ``The BJP is strongly of the view that this law is most necessary for the whole country. Lots of money is coming into the country from Islamic organizations to aid conversions,'' said BJP President M. Venkaih Naidu. Ashok Singhal, leader of the World Hindu Council (VHP), hailed the law as a ``timely and bold step'' and he urged other states to pass similar laws. The issue of religious conversion has long been a source of strife in India. While federal law allows Indians to change their faith, the ruling BJP makes no secret of its dislike to the practice, while its ruling partner--the VHP party--views conversions as betrayal. Opponents of the new law warn it will only trigger an even larger exodus of Hindus to other faiths. The Global Council of Indian Christians said it was ``alarmed by the hurriedly promulgated ordinance,'' and called it ``the most heinous violation of religious freedom aimed at targeting Christian missionaries engaged in poverty alleviation and spreading the light of education. The All-Indian Christian People's Forum said that it went against the core of the Constitution. ``This ordinance is uncalled for, unwarranted and smacks of a pro-Hindu ideological basis of the . . . government''. ``The bill runs foul of Article 25 [25] of the Indian Constitution, which grants freedom of conscience and free profession, practice and propagation of religion to every Indian citizen,'' the group said. Dominic Emmanuel, director of New Delhi Catholic Archdiocese, called the measure, ``an assault as much on civil rights as on human rights as on human dignity.'' John Daya, secretary-general of the Christian Council in New Delhi, said: ``In fact the only inducements by fraud and fear are those being carried out by [Hindu organizations] in the tribal belt, where innocent tribals are being forced to become Hindus.'' Muslims, too, are concerned. How can conversions be prevented if an individual is attracted to another religion because of his or her faith in it? Force is never used to convert one to Islam because it is against the basic tenets of [Islam],'' said Maolana Siddikullah Chowdhury, general secretary of the Jamiat-e- Ulema party in Calcutta. He added that low-caste Hindus converted to Islam simply to ``escape discrimination and ill treatment'' and not under any coercion.

Mr. BURTON of Indiana

Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Mr. Speaker, everybody knows that mercury is a toxic substance. If it is spilled on the ground, they evacuate the area and they bring in the fire department and they clean it up with all kinds of paraphernalia to protect the citizens and the firemen that are working on it, and yet it is injected into our children's bodies in our vaccinations, and in the Homeland Security bill this year they eliminated the possibility of the families who have been damaged and the children who have been damaged by the mercury in these vaccines from having any chance to get restitution from the pharmaceutical companies or from the Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund. That is criminal. It needs to be changed. We have the fastest growing epidemic in America and the parents have nowhere to go, and it is caused in large part by the mercury in the vaccines. This is just tragic. We need to correct that in the technical corrections bill very, very quickly so these parents have some recourse. They are mortgaging their homes. They are going bankrupt trying to take care of these children. One in 10,000 children used to be autistic. Now it is one in 180. It is an absolute epidemic and this government prohibited the families from finding a way to take care of their children, and these kids are going to grow up. These kids are going to grow up, and they are going to be a burden on society unless we do something about it now. And in addition Mr. Speaker, I just found out that the vaccines that we are giving to our military personnel who are over in the Persian Gulf who may be going to war with Iraq, they are being vaccinated with vaccines that contain mercury as well. We need to get mercury out of all vaccines and we need to make absolutely sure that the parents who have damaged children have some course to get restitution this government should not block. It is criminal.

Mr. BURTON of Indiana

Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Mr. Speaker, as we come back to Washington this January and set our priorities for the first session of the 108th Congress, I want to remind my colleagues that we have a looming crisis--a crisis of spirit, of policies, and of economics. This crisis is a looming and immediate economic crisis to the education system, to health care systems, to long-term housing and care for the disabled, to un-addressed research needs, and most especially to an increasing number of families across the country. This crisis is the autism epidemic. Over the last three years, you have heard me speak many times on this issue--and you will continue to hear me speak on this issue because we have our work cut out for us. You well know that my own grandson was adversely affected by a series of vaccines and became autistic. When I looked at what I thought was a rare condition, I found that my grandson was one among many similarly injured. Our health agencies have spent much of the last decade in denial about this problem. To date, they have not replicated clinical studies that point to a connection between autism entercolitis and the Measles, Mumps, Rubella (MMR) vaccine. Nor have our health agencies adequately addressed the dangers of thimerosal in pediatric vaccines and the fact that tens of thousands of families feel their children were injured from thimerosal-containing vaccines, leaving their child autistic. Autism is a condition that has no known cure. Children, whether autistic from birth as a result of vaccine injury, genetic defects, or as a result of some other environmental influence, require lots of special medical and educational attention. The earlier a diagnosis is made and interventions are begun, the better the long-term outlook can be for a child. This is why the programs such as First Steps in Indiana are so important. However, this attention gets to be very expensive. Many of the private schools, specifically designed to educate children with autism have annual tuitions of $60,000 or more. Many of these children, when in public schools, require a full-time one-on-one aide, and numerous other special accommodations including speech and occupational therapies. Mainstream and Special Education Teachers need special autism teacher training. Every child with autism or any disability is entitled under Federal law to a free and appropriate education. Prevalence of Autism Last week the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published in the Journal of the American Medical Association their Prevalence Study of Autism Rates in metropolitan Atlanta. In this report, they acknowledged that autism prevalence rates published prior to 1985 were 4 to 5 per 10,000 for autism spectrum disorders and 1 to 2 per 10,000 for the more narrow definition of autism. In Atlanta in 1996, the rates in children ages 3 to 10 had skyrocketed to a range of 19 per 10,000 to 47 per 10,000. Two years ago, the CDC published their 1998 prevalence study of children in Brick Township, New Jersey and found that 40 per 10,000 children were autistic and 67 per 10,000 were diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. Let's do the math here. According to our latest Census, there are 72.3 million children under the age of 18 in this country. If we extrapolate the Atlanta numbers nationwide, that would mean that in 1996 we may have had between 137,370 and 339,810 children under the age of 18 with autism in this country. And if we use the newer 1998 Brick Township numbers, nationwide we had 289,200 children with autism and 484,410 children on the autism spectrum. Education System Burden The Department of Education tells us that it spends on average $12,234 more each year for a child with autism than it does for educating a non-disabled child. ($18,790 average cost of educating a child with autism compared to $6,556 to educate a non-disabled child.) So that would mean our education system needs to find additional resources on the magnitude of 3.5 to 5.9 billion dollars each year to educate children with autism. Since many of the children in our system are not getting the services they really need, the $18,790 is probably much lower than it ought to be. Realistically, schools will likely need about $40,000 per child with autism to provide the full breadth of services needed. So that would mean, the education system needs to budget approximately $16 billion dollars a year more just for children with autism. Most of this additional tax burden falls on the local and state tax base. We in Congress need to act quickly this session to keep our promise to pay the 40 percent Federal portion to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) Part B. We haven't even come close to keeping that promise and local school jurisdictions are feeling the strain of carrying this burden. Many children go without services and that is a travesty. Family Economic Burden We have learned from families that they often spend between $20,000 and $50,000 each year, much of it not reimbursed to provide care and services for their autistic children. This is a huge burden for any family to carry. There are no magic bullet approaches to treating autism. As yet there is no cure. Half of the children with autism will never speak. Many of these children have severe food sensitivities, especially to casein and gluten, products that are in almost every processed food. Many are highly sensitive to many chemicals--even perfumes. Exposure to these foods or chemicals causes a serious deterioration in behavior. Many have autoimmune disorders; have enzyme deficiencies, and heavy metal toxicities. Some individuals with autism will go through bouts of self-injurious behavior. Some, particularly autistic boys, as they hit their teen years when all teenage boys experience that surge of testosterone, may experience aggressive behavior, requiring medication. While some individuals with autism, those with higher functioning autism or Asperger's Syndrome may be able to go on to college and even live independently, the vast majority of today's children with autism will never have that opportunity unless we can turn this epidemic around. The vast majority of these boys and girls will never have the chance to serve in the armed forces, to become doctors, lawyers, teachers, or astronauts. They will never have the chance that you and I have had to run for political office. Adults with Autism--Long-Term Care and Disability Housing We have no good numbers on how many autistic adults there are in this country. Many are institutionalized because their parents can no longer care for them. Obviously, our current infrastructure for long-term care for the disabled is not equipped to manage the more than tenfold increase they will be facing in the next decade. Research Needs As I mentioned, there is no cure for autism. The research response to looking at causes, treatments, and possible cures for autism has been vastly inadequate. Out of a twenty-seven billion dollar budget, the National Institutes of Health has focused less than sixty million dollars on autism. A condition they say affects 1 in 250 children in this country and they only invested sixty million dollars to address the epidemic. And unfortunately, most of those sixty million dollars will never translate into treatments for autism or in answering the questions about a possible vaccine injury connection. The CDC, while spending over 930 million dollars on AIDS last year invested only about $11 million dollars on autism. We must treat this like an epidemic and mobilize research and services resources to address the epidemic. And most disturbing to families of vaccine-injured autistic children is that none of the government agencies have adequately addressed their concerns about thimerosal and the MMR vaccine. Instead of a replication of clinical evidence indicating low-level measles infection lingering in the gastrointestinal tract of children who became autistic after receiving the MMR vaccine, they cited CDC funded population-based epidemiological studies and used these epidemiological studies to say there is no connection between MMR and autism. In fact, epidemiological research cannot disprove clinical research. This is like trying to make lemonade with apples. And in two difference prevalence studies--in New Jersey and Georgia, the CDC had an opportunity to do a thorough evaluation of a potential link between autism and immunizations and they chose not to. In fact, the families in Brick Township requested this analysis. The CDC evaluated environmental influences and all other possible causes, but they chose not to look at the immunization records and see if there might be a link. In the CDC's initial evaluation in their Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) looking at a possible link between thimerosal-containing vaccines and any health conditions, they found a statistically significant correlation between thimerosal-containing vaccines and attention deficit disorder, neurological developmental disorders, speech and language delays and tics. After these initial findings, the CDC conducted a second evaluation that was in a much smaller population and did not find the same correlations. It is obvious that much more research is needed. We had to fight for more than two years to get the CDC to open up access to the VSD data, and unfortunately we have learned that some independent researchers are still having a hard time accessing this data. The Department needs to make sure that independent researchers can easily access this data to conduct replications of existing studies and to conduct new studies that the Department has not done. We hear repeatedly in Congressional hearings, in media communications, and through reports that ``there is no evidence that proves a connection between vaccines and autism.'' And of course, if the Department of Health and Human Services never funds or conducts the right studies, the evidence proving a connection will never exist. But the lack of well-designed research asking the right questions does not mean that a connection is not there. What it does mean is that our health agencies have failed the American public. For ten years, the Institute of Medicine has asked for research to be conducted in this area--to look at the autism-vaccine connection. This independent agency has repeatedly found that there is a paucity of studies evaluating vaccine adverse reactions. They found that there was inadequate science to rule in or rule out a connection between autism and thimerosal, but they also found that is was ``biologically plausible'' for such an injury to occur. We continue to see the Department of Health and Human Service's agencies stalling on doing the right kinds of studies. Vaccines are the only medications that are mandated for American citizens to receive as a condition of school and day care attendance and in some instances, for employment. Therefore, it is even more important that vaccines are as safe as possible, that only those vaccines that are really needed are mandated, and that we accelerate the level of well designed studies that actually answer the questions on vaccine adverse reactions. No More Conflicts of Interest in Research and Policy It is important for individuals and institutions that are going to conduct this research not to have financial ties to the manufacturers of vaccines. It is a travesty that the NIH and CDC only seem to fund those institutions that also receive a lot of pharmaceutical funding and do not fund those researchers who have chosen not to accept industry money and who are in the trenches answering the tough questions. Some of those researchers have been before the Committee on Government Reform. They had long histories of receiving NIH funding, but as soon as they started looking at vaccine injury issues, their NIH funding dried up. This is a clear indication to me that out health agencies are more devoted to the vaccine industry than to the vaccine injured. This must change. It is also a travesty that so many of the experts that HHS agencies appoint to sit on advisory committees are individuals who have financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry. The Vaccine Injury Compensation Program Late in the 107th Congress, we as a Congress failed this same community, Mr. Speaker, by tacking provisions into the Homeland Security Act which cut off the ability of families to seek legal recourse to the manufacturers of thimerosal, while not including provisions to include those families whose statute of limitation had expired, in the Vaccine Injury Compensation program. We as a Congress have failed this community. This retroactive provision was not about homeland security. We tripled infants' exposure to thimerosal through their vaccines for the first six months of life in the late 1980's. And yet it was not until 1999 that the FDA realized what they had done. It was more than ten years before they realized the dramatic increase in infants' exposure to mercury. Many families realized that their child became autistic after receiving vaccines, but they had nowhere to turn. Doctors discounted the possible connection because they were not informed until late 1999 of this thimerosal/mercury exposure in vaccines. Many of these families were not aware that the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program existed until well after their three year statute of limitations had expired. The Department of Health and Human Services acknowledges that their media campaigns on this program were inadequate. In fact it has been the advent of the Internet and online autism and vaccine injury discussion groups that first informed most of these families of this program. We must work quickly this year to first repeal the provisions of the Homeland Security Act that cut off families' legal options and second to pass legislation that will improve the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program for these families and for all individuals who face an injury from a covered vaccine. There is over 1.3 billion dollars in the trust fund. It is wrong that families have to fight for five, seven, even ten years to be compensated. It was not supposed to be a fight or a long process. The over-zealous government lawyers and program managers have lost sight of what this program is about. The Compensation program was supposed to be compassionate and non-litigious. When it was a close call, the program was supposed to rule in favor of the injured. Instead, the government goes to battle on many of the close cases and challenges the special masters when they lose. Oftentimes, when the Special Master rules in favor of the injured, Justice Department lawyers and HHS program managers call it a ``bad decision by the Special Master.'' They see this as litigation and not compensation and because of that mindset, in many instances; it has become exactly what Congress was trying to avoid--a difficult, litigious, drawn-out process. Mr. Speaker, in November I wrote the President and asked him to host a White House Conference on Autism to address many of these issues. Today the families of vaccine-injured children are in Washington to protest the loss of their legal options as a result of the Homeland Security Act provisions. I hope that my colleagues will take the time to listen to these families--their constituents--as they come around to their offices this week. Many of my colleagues are already members of the Autism Caucus and will be actively working on autism issues this year. Every member of Congress needs to pay attention to this issue. Autism and vaccine issues are not partisan issues. I am pleased that in the last congressional session we set aside partisanship and focused on the issues. I hope that as we bring legislation through committees and to the floor for votes, that I can count on all of your support to put the families first, to do the right thing, and pass effective, compassionate legislation. I am introducing legislation today to repeal the provisions in the Homeland Security Act and I hope to have all of your cooperation in getting this done quickly. These families deserve justice and the opportunity to seek compensation.

Mr. BURTON of Indiana

Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Mr. Speaker, there was an interesting article in the Washington Post on December 11. It shows that hate can be a winning platform in India. The article focuses on Jeetubhai Waghela, a candidate of the ruling BJP in the recent elections. He was involved in the killings in Gujarat last year, according to Muslims there. Now he runs as a protector of Hindus and this platform of hatred gains votes for him. The Indian government has oppressed minorities for many years. In 1984, almost 20 years ago, it invaded the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the most sacred of Sikh shrines. Since then, over 250,000 Sikhs have been murdered by the government, according to figures from the Punjab State Magistracy. 52,268 Sikhs are being held as political prisoners, according to a study from the Movement Against State Repression. These political prisoners should be released immediately. The government was directly involved in the murders in Gujarat last year, according to published reports in India. It has killed over 85,000 Kashmiri Muslims as well as Muslims throughout the country. Over 200,000 Christians have been killed in Nagaland. Since Christmas 1998, priests have been murdered, nuns have been raped, churches have been burned, and Christian schools and prayer halls have been attacked. Missionary Graham Staines and his two young sons were burned to death while they slept in their Jeep. Police broke up a religious festival with gunfire. These acts have been carried out by government forces or by their Hindu nationalist allies with government connivance. Is this a democracy? We can help stop hate in the subcontinent. We must cut off our aid to India and we must come out for a free and fair plebiscite on independence in Kashmir, as India promised in 1948, as well as in Khalistan, in Nagaland, and the other countries seeking their freedom from India. Self-determination is the right of all peoples and nations, Mr. Speaker. That was the principle on which America is founded. It must be the principle that we promote around the world. Mr. Speaker, I would like to place the Washington Post article I referred to into the Record at this time. [From the Washington Post, Dec. 11, 2002] In Indian Election, Hate Is Part of Platform (By Rama Lakshmi) Ahmedabad, India--The candidate marched down the slum's narrow lanes, followed by men dancing to the sound of loud drums and spraying the streets with marigold petals. Hindu women paused from their chores of peeling garlic and doing laundry to offer garlands and blessings. The cheerful scene, part of Jeetubhai Waghela's campaign for a seat in the state legislature, played out beneath a cloth banner that revealed a more ominous aspect of the coming election here in India's western state of Gujarat. The banner vows to avenge the killing of 58 Hindus during an attack on a train by Muslims last February, and as the supporters of Waghela, a member of the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), pressed forward and choked the alleys, Muslim residents quickly hurried indoors. ``Here comes the lion,'' roared Waghela's men. Nine months ago, as Gujarat was being riven by religious violence that followed the killing of the Hindus, Waghela stormed the same streets with a mob of Hindu men wearing orange bandanas and armed with swords, sticks and gasoline, according to witnesses and police records. Shouting angry slogans at Muslim residents, Waghela allegedly ordered the mob to loot and destroy their homes, leaving them homeless for months. ``For three days, Waghela and his men looted and burnt our homes. For eight months, we lived in relief camps because of him,'' said Nasir Khan, a complainant. ``Now he tells Hindus he is their protector against us. Where do we run for cover if he gets elected?'' After a Muslim mob in the town of Godhra killed 58 Hindu train passengers in February, more than 1,000 people died, most of them Muslim, in weeks of arson and killing throughout Gujarat. Human rights groups have accused the BJP--the ruling party in Gujarat as well as in India's national government-- of essentially ignoring the killings by its Hindu extremist allies. As Gujarat prepares to elect a new state legislature on Thursday, many analysts are describing the vote as an important test of the secular foundations of India's religiously and ethnically diverse democracy. In a state where only 9 percent of the population of 50 million is Muslim, the BJP is counting on sectarian passions to consolidate the Hindu vote. Throughout the state, BJP leaders have delivered fiery speeches against Muslims involved in the Feb. 27 attack and against Pakistan-aided Islamic militants killing Hindus in the revolt-wracked province of Jammu and Kashmir. One such party stalwart is Waghela, who was arrested in connection with this year's riots on four charges, including murder and rioting. Jailed for 108 days and now free on bail, Waghela, 31, is back here in Gomtipur, a mixed working-class neighborhood in Ahmedabad, with folded hands, asking for votes for the BJP. He denies playing a role in the riots and insists he was framed. Campaigning on a recent morning, Waghela identified a new target of hate for his Hindu voters. Climbing on a platform, he told them that a fancy new high-rise for Muslims is being planned adjacent to their homes, on the site of a closed textile mill. He warned them that they would not be safe any longer. ``You will be surrounded from all sides by Muslims,'' said Waghela, breathlessly flicking back his hair from his forehead. ``Don't let them gain power over you. Vote for me and I will stop that building plan.'' ``Do you want the building here?'' he said. ``No!'' the crowd shouted back. This election is critical to the political destiny of the BJP, which has suffered defeats in several state elections in the past two years. Gujarat is the last major state in which the party holds power, and critics fear that it could use a victory here as an endorsement of strident Hindu politics. The national coalition that the BJP leads in New Delhi under Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee will face the polls in 2004. ``In this election, the BJP is seeking a legitimization of violence that its members indulged in against the Muslims,'' said Achyut Yagnik, a political analyst and social worker in Gujarat. ``The results in Gujarat will determine whether they take this appeal of Hindutva [Hindu chauvinism] beyond Gujarat.'' The BJP's main challenger in Gujarat--and at the national level--is the Congress party, which attacks the BJP's Hindu fundamentalism for endangering the lives and rights of India's religious minorities. As a result, Gujarat's Muslims and Christians have rallied behind Congress, while many Hindu voters in Gujarat feel that Congress, headed at the national level by the Italian-born Sonia Gandhi, has an anti-Hindu slant and defends only the religious minorities. Opinion polls show that it is likely to be a close contest between the BJP and Congress. Some secular analysts said that although Hindu voters may find the demagoguery of the BJP attractive, the social divisions inherent in the caste system may prevent Hindus from voting as a bloc. The Muslims of Gujarat, on the other hand, appear to have decided to vote en masse for Congress. Yet many complained that Congress took their support for granted and often forgot them when attaining power. They will vote for Congress, they say, simply because they have no other choice. Nowhere is this frustration felt more sharply than in Godhra, the epicenter of Gujarat's religious strife. The BJP's candidate in Godhra, Haresh Bhatt, campaigns under banners of the burning train, distributes pictures of the dead Hindu passengers and describes the election as a ``religious war.'' But the Congress candidate there, Rajendra Singh Patel, many Muslims said, was involved in burning the shops and homes of Muslims in March. ``We made two appeals to the Congress last month not to field Patel in the elections, but they still made him the candidate,'' said Mohammad Yusaf, 56, a clerk in the city government. ``But we are caught between a ditch and a well. To defeat the BJP, we will have to vote for Patel. But our heart is not in it.''

Mr. BURTON of Indiana

Mr. BURTON of Indiana. I will, Mr. Speaker. I am not going to do it again. I have gotten it down already. But they went to the Senator, the Senator from Mississippi, Trent Lott, the majority leader, and said they were going to vote for an amendment to take a whole bunch of things out, including this provision, if they did not agree to take this out for retroactivity in a bill that will come up for corrections after the first of the year. I want to thank them personally for that. Now, during the debate in the Senate, some of my colleagues, including some eminent doctors, said there was a Danish study that showed that thimerosal and mercury did not cause autism. First of all, let me tell the Members that the Danes, Denmark, quit using thimerosal in 1992. Second, the study that they referred to had nothing to do with thimerosal. It had to do with the MMR vaccine. It had nothing to do with mercury. So my colleagues who are experts in the Senate that were talking about this Danish study did not read the darned thing. It had nothing to do with mercury. I want to tell the Members about some people who have had some problems. I became interested in this, and I did not even know what autism was. I saw the movie Rain Man, and I did not know much about autism. I did not know what caused it. But I knew that, in the movie, he was brilliant in some areas, but he could not clothe himself or feed himself and had all kinds of problems. Then my grandson got nine shots in one day. Two days later, the child that was normal was running around banging his head against the wall, flapping his hands, had constant constipation and diarrhea combined, and he would not look at you anymore, and he could not talk. He had autism. I decided to start taking a look at this problem and find out what caused it. Nine shots in one day, seven of which had mercury in them. The cumulative effect of those shots showed that he had 40 times the amount of mercury that was tolerable in an individual in one day. He is ruined for life. We might say that that is an isolated case. Do Members know how many people are autistic in America, how many kids? Ten years ago, it was one in 10,000. Now it is one in 250, a 40-fold increase in 10 years. And we had the audacity to take the only tool that these parents had out of their hands to soothe the pharmaceutical companies that manufactured that. The pharmaceutical companies, make no mistake about it, ought to be held responsible. I would like to go through the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program if we could adjust it to make it fair to all these families, but we cannot write off people who have gone beyond the 3-year period and have no recourse unless they sue. We have to adjust that vaccine compensation program, and that is what we need to do next year. I have had so many hearings on this. That is why I am so surprised we were not contacted. I have had mothers come in and fathers come in. It is four times more prevalent in boys than girls. In Brick Township in New Jersey, it is one out of less than 150 kids that are autistic. They believe that the mercury is being acquired in additional ways, as well. When we hear these stories about these families that are going through this we just cannot understand it, why it is happening. They said the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program that we came up with in the late eighties, thanks to the gentleman from California (Mr. Waxman) on the Democratic side and my colleagues on the Republican side, was supposed to be a solution. It was going to help the pharmaceutical companies to reduce the number of lawsuits against them by saying that we had to first go through this vaccine injury compensation fund, and it was supposed to be nonadversarial. We had people come before the committee who had kids who had been damaged by vaccines, including those containing mercury. Some of them had to wait until their child died before they got the money. One of the people was threatened by the Justice Department, saying, if they said anything about this, they would appeal the case and they would not get paid. So this is a very adversarial situation. That needs to be corrected, too, because these parents are putting out thousands of dollars out of their pockets to take care of their kids. Their kids' lives are ruined. They have to deal with it. Eighty-five percent of the people that are married that have autistic kids get divorced, 85 percent, because of the pressures on the family. Let me just tell the Members about a couple of other cases besides the one that I am involved with with my family. Incidentally, I have two grandchildren. My grandson is autistic, and my granddaughter got a Hepatitis B shot which contained mercury, and she quit breathing 2 hours later. They rushed her to the hospital, gave her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and she recovered and she was fine. Yet, she now has grand mal seizures. We never had those in our family, in the history of our family on either side. We thought she was getting over them, and last night my daughter called me this morning and said she had another seizure in the middle of the night; a beautiful child, cheerleader, 9 years old. Members would see a picture and say this kid is beautiful. Yet, she has been affected by something, and I think it is probably the mercury in the vaccines. Anybody that does not know mercury is a very toxic substance has their head in the wrong place. They took it out of Mercurochrome years ago. Remember when we used to put that red stuff on our skin, Mercurochrome? They took it out of there years ago because they said it caused some skin damage, plus there was concern about the mercury leaching into the skin, going to the brain, and causing neurological problems; yet they are still using it in vaccines. Let me tell the Members about the Zuhlke case. Janet Zuhlke's daughter had a severe reaction to a childhood vaccination almost immediately after she got her shot. It was an injury that was on the injury table established by Congress. When you are on that injury table, compensation is supposed to be almost automatic. The vaccine injury was certified by some of the most prominent neurologists in Florida, but the Justice Department has fought her case for 10 years so she could not collect from the vaccine injury compensation fund. Her daughter got the shot when she was 6 years old. She is almost 18 now. The family has not received a cent, although they are finally getting close to resolving the case. Why should that case take 10 years? It is on the list. Neurologists verified that the child was damaged by the vaccine; yet, nothing has happened. The Barton case, Lori Barton of New Mexico, had a similar experience. Her son's case was a little more complicated, but he did have a table injury. That is on the table of injuries. Again, we had a case that took 10 years to resolve. After this lengthy fight, the Barton's finally won compensation. The problem is their son died halfway through the case. Lori Barton and her mother testified before my committee that they were cross-examined like criminals by the government attorney. After they finally won their case, the government threatened to appeal the ruling and drag it out for another year unless the family agreed not to have the case publicly listed so it could set a precedent for other families. Can you believe that? The child died and they agreed they should be compensated out of the fund, but they threatened them, saying if you say anything about this we will carry this thing on for another year. And God only knows how many thousands of dollars that they had to put out to take care of this problem. This was supposed to be a nonadversarial program. I want to thank Dr. Cathy Pratt from the Indiana Autism Resource Center at Indiana University for helping my kids in these early days. I want to show my colleagues some of these charts here, because I think a picture sometimes is better than a thousand words. This is what has happened in California. A 300 percent increase. And these figures do not go past 2000. That is California. Now, we have a program called IDEA, and that is where we put money into a fund that goes out to the States to help children who have learning disabilities. This is Indiana, my home State. If we look here, we see that in the early 1990s, back to 1980, it was pretty level, the amount of autism we had. But then they introduced two additional vaccines that had a large amount of thimerosal in them, the Hib vaccine, which dealt with a flu-type problem children have, and the hepatitis B vaccine. Now, if my colleagues will look at this, you can see the huge increase in the amount of autism since 1990; and the schools cannot cope with it because many of these kids need one-on-one attention to help them. They cannot cope with it because there has not been enough money appropriated for the IDEA program. Well, I am for cutting government spending, but if we are not going to take care of these kids one way, they have to be taken care another way. So, educationally, we can see there is a problem. Talk to any school in the country. I submit to my colleagues, call them up and talk to them. They will tell you that they are being inundated with kids with autism, and they are having a difficult time helping them with their education. Some of them can be educated and become fairly independent later in life. But the fact of the matter is, we have to educate them. In California, they estimate that between the ages of 6 and 18 an autistic child is going to cost the State $2 million. Two million dollars. The cost to this country for autism is going to be in the billions and billions, and maybe the trillions, of dollars in the years to come if we do not find a solution to this problem. It used to be 1 in 10,000 children. In some parts of the country, it is 1 in 150 that are autistic right now. But nationwide, according to CDC and HHS, our health agencies, there has been a 40-fold increase. It is 1 in 250. I submit that any person who has a child ought to think very carefully about what they are putting into their child in those vaccinations. I am for vaccinations. I think they are very important. They made this one of the most healthy nations in the world. In fact, the most healthy Nation. But there are certain things put into them that should not be in there, in my opinion; and I think scientists around the world would bear that out. Now, the Autism Society of America estimates that autism is increasing at a rate of 10 to 17 percent each year, and that is faster than any other disease in the country. Any other disease. The Autism Society of America estimates that the total cost of autism each year is between $20 billion and $60 billion to our economy. I talked about the school problems. Parents who have autistic children who are past the 3-year statute of limitations have no place to go. And I have talked to parents who have gone bankrupt, who have had their children die, who have ended up in divorce, have had all kinds of problems because of the problems that their children have incurred from autism. And yet they say there is no research that shows one way or the other what is causing it. Scientists in other parts of the world, in Denmark, as I say, they have taken mercury out of vaccines back in 1992, and yet in the early 1990s we were adding more mercury to the vaccines of our children. When I was a kid, we got maybe two or three vaccinations. We got the smallpox vaccine, everybody knows about that, and we will probably get that again, but we did not get very many. And there was not a lot of thimerosal being injected into our bodies. But now a child gets between 25 and 30 shots before they go to school. Many of them contained, in the past, mercury; and many scientists believe that that is one of the major causes of autism. But there has not been any studies. Why has the FDA and the CDC not done extensive studies? Where did thimerosal come from in the first place? Back in the 1930s, the 1920s, they came up with this idea of putting a preservative in vaccinations that contained mercury. They tested it on 20 some people. This is back around 1929, 1928; and the 20 some people that they tested thimerosal on all had meningitis and they all died. But it was not because of the thimerosal, it was because of the meningitis. So they said it did not have any dilatory or adverse effect. That is a heck of a test. When I asked the FDA why they have not tested it since, they say it is because after so long a time a thing has been used, they accept it as an acceptable preservative. But it has never been tested in humans. They have tested it in some animals and rats, and a lot of them died. I would like to go into all those studies with my colleagues, but I will put those in the Congressional Record and my colleagues can read them at their leisure. The fact is that mercury in vaccines is not good. It is wrong. It is a toxic substance and should not be there. The CDC is spending $932 million a year on the AIDS epidemic, and AIDs deserves attention. So does diabetes. This year we are going to spend $62 million on diabetes, and we probably ought to spend more than that. But do you know how much they are spending on research for our children who are autistic? About $10 million. So we are spending 80 times more on AIDS research than we are on autism, yet it is the fastest-growing problem in America. And we are spending five to six times more on diabetes than we are on autism. The National Institutes of Health has a total this year of $27 billion. That is $27,000 billion. And they have been spending $22 million on autism out of $27 billion. This past year, because we have been raising cain, they did kick it up to $56 million. But $56 million out of $27 billion on the fastest-growing problem in America is not very much, and they have not researched the correlation between mercury in vaccines and autism. We need to find out the cause. We need to determine how to stop the epidemic. We need to evaluate treatment options. We need to make sure that the people who are damaged from mercury in vaccines are compensated. The people who produce the thimerosal, the mercury-based preservative, do not contribute anything to the vaccine injury compensation fund. And with the language that was put in the bill, gets them off scot-free. They do not ever have to worry about it. Because they are not putting any money in the fund right now, and they certainly would not have to if that language stayed in the bill in the future. And that is wrong. Because we should find out, and I believe we will find out, that they are a contributing factor, a major factor, in autism. As I said before, thimerosal is 50 percent mercury, 50 percent mercury and 50 percent thiosalicylic acid. A 6-month old baby that received all the vaccines on schedule would get 75 micrograms of mercury from three doses of DTaP, 75 micrograms of mercury from three doses of Hib, and 37.5 micrograms from three doses of hepatitis B vaccine. That is a total of 187.5 micrograms, and that exceeds the suggested safe limits published by the EPA. I do not know if the FDA talks to the EPA or not. That is something we are trying to solve with Homeland Security. But we have the EPA saying that the amount of mercury from those three vaccines that are going into our kids exceeds the safe levels in an adult. That is what the EPA says. Yet that is what we are doing, and have been doing, and the parents have no recourse. Many clinics and doctors, as I said before, still have on their shelves vaccines that contain thimerosal. Those should be recalled. All that should be recalled. They say they are not producing any more, but we should not be putting any more into our kids. And they should not be putting it into adults either. We in Congress and people across this country should not get a flu shot and unknowingly have mercury injected into them year after year after year. Because, as I said, it has a cumulative effect in the brain, and you can talk to any scientist and they will tell you that. I read to my colleagues before part of the report that was given in an HHS document that I had to subpoena. I want to read again a little bit of that. This is an HHS document that we had to subpoena to get. It says, ``Preliminary screening of ICD-9 codes for possible neurologic and renal conditions following exposures to vaccines containing thimerosal, mercury, before 3 months of age showed a statistical association for the overall category of neurological developmental disorders and for two conditions within the category, speech delay and attention deficit disorder.'' So they are saying there is a statistical link between that and these kids that are under 3 months old that are getting these vaccines. And yet, when a child is in a hospital right now, they are getting a hepatitis B vaccine before they leave the hospital. And the only way you can get hepatitis B is through sex, needles or blood. Now, I do not know how many kids are out there having sex or using needles or having a blood transfusion. But, unless you have those, there is no need for those kids to even be getting that vaccine at that age. In 2001, the Institute of Medicine concluded that a connection between thimerosal and autism, while unproven, is biologically plausible. ``The IOM called for further research, stating evidence is inadequate to accept or reject a causal relationship between exposure to mercury, thimerosal, from vaccines and neurological developmental disorders of autism, ADHD, and speech and language delays.'' So they do not know, because they have never done any testing on it, and yet they continue to inject our kids with this stuff. I want to go on and quote a little more of what she said. She says, ``Because mercury at high doses is known to pose risks, some parents and researchers are concerned that thimerosal in vaccines put children at increased risk for developmental disorders such as autism. Preliminary data from a few studies have suggested that thimerosal- containing vaccines could possibly,'' could possibly, but then she says, ``very minimally,'' because they do not know, ``affect some measures of normal child development. But the data are inclusive.'' If it is inconclusive, why have our health agencies not been checking it out? Why have they not done something since 1929 to check this substance out, instead of continuing to inject mercury into our kids? They have taken mercury out of thermometers, they have taken it out of our topical dressings, and yet they are still injecting it into our kids and into adults. And I want to say something that is very interesting. They are taking it out of children's vaccines here in America, but they are still putting it in vaccines they are sending to Third World countries. So my colleagues who are concerned about Africa and India and other parts of the world where they have huge populations and they have to vaccinate their kids, mercury is being injected into those kids, even though they are starting to take it out of vaccines here in America. That shows what we think sometimes in our health agencies about the rest of the world. ``Existing epidemiological evidence is inadequate to either accept or reject a causal relationship between exposure to thimerosal from vaccines and neurodevelopmental disorders of autism.'' It is important to remember that the absence of proof of a correlation between vaccines and autism is far different than having a test and proving no vaccine causation. Now, what does this mean for families? I want to tell Members about another family which has been before our committee. Scott Bono of Durham, North Carolina, testified before our committee a few years ago. His son, Jackson Bono, is one of those children who was adversely affected by thimerosal. He has autism. He is documented to have toxic levels of mercury in his body. He is now 13 years old. It is likely that the case his family has filed with the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program will be kicked out because of the 3-year statute of limitations. Unless his family can seek compensation through civil litigation, they will likely never be compensated for their child's vaccine injury. They know that he has mercury in his body at toxic levels. But because the 3-year statute of limitations has passed, he has no recourse. We did not publicize this nationwide. When we came up with this Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, they did not tell all Americans who had autistic children they had 3 years to file. A lot of people thought they had no recourse, so they filed suit and they did not go to the Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund; and they found out 3 years later, too late, that they could have gone to this fund and maybe been paid. Mr. Speaker, that is why we need to reevaluate the entire fund and the approach to it. We need to have at least 6 years and a 2-year look- back provision to allow parents with damaged children to have access to that. If it costs more money to put into the fund by the pharmaceutical companies, right now they are paying so much per shot into the fund, like a tax on each shot, then if we have to increase that a little bit, so be it. But those families need to be compensated, and they should not be shut out just because 3 years has passed. I want to tell Members what I think ought to be in the Vaccine Compensation Program, and the gentleman from California (Mr. Waxman) and I, along with the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Weldon), have filed a bill that I hope will do this. Since this issue has become so big because of the homeland security bill, I hope Members will vote favorably for this bill next year. First, the bill increases compensation for future lost earnings for injured children. Under current law, compensation is based on the average weekly earnings of full and part-time workers as determined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This bill would specify that only full- time workers should be used in the calculation so that there is a realistic amount of money for lost time and wages. It would increase the level of compensation to a family after a vaccine-related death from $250,000 to $300,000. The death benefit has remained unchanged since the program's inception in 1986. Inflation alone makes it higher than that. It would allow families of vaccine-injured children to be compensated for the costs of family counseling and creating and maintaining a guardianship to administer the funds and allow for the payment of interim attorneys' fees. They cannot get an attorney to take their case because it is such a long-drawn-out procedure. If they are not in the class action suit and they go to an attorney, he says, I want some money for my work. These attorneys do not work pro bono, so it is difficult to find attorneys to take their cases. So we ought to allow for payment of interim attorneys' fees and legal costs while the petition is being adjudicated. The costs of assembling the necessary medical records and obtaining expert witnesses are substantial. Under current laws, these costs, as well as the attorneys' fees, are not reimbursed until the case is finally resolved, and they are not being resolved. We should extend the statute of limitations 6 years from the date of injury. Under current law, families have to file within 2 years of the child's death or 3 years of the child's injury. We should provide a one-time, 2-year period for families to file a petition if they were previously excluded from doing so because they missed the statute of limitations. So we ought to publicize across the country if a child is autistic and they were damaged by a vaccine in the compensation fund list table, that parents ought to have 2 years to file for their child's injury. There have been other bills which have been introduced. However, the other bills also appear to protect industry more than protecting the families; and we need to scrutinize those very, very carefully. Let me just conclude, and I know that I have been going on here for a long time, but I want to show Members one more chart. This chart shows Dr. Leo Canner discovered autism among children born in the 1930s, and it shows a pretty consistent rate of autism for those who were being vaccinated. Then we increased the rate of vaccination here in the late 1960s, early 1970s, and then we notice that the Hib vaccine was introduced and the hepatitis B vaccine was introduced in the early 1990s. If we look at this chart, the rate of autism from vaccine is pretty constant until the early 1990s, and then it spiked. We went from 1 in 10,000 kids to 1 in 250 nationally that are damaged with autism. It is unconscionable to me. And I am one of those conservative guys. I am a conservative. I do not like to see the government spend money. I believe the government that governs best governs least, and I believe in lower taxes, so I am pretty much the last guy Members would expect to see up here talking about this. Government has to have a heart, as well as being a guardian of the pocketbook; and when parents who have children who are autistic and they suspect that they have been damaged by vaccines or mercury, they ought to have some recourse, and right now they have virtually none. The producers of the vaccines, they ought to be protected to a degree, too. That is why I supported the Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund. But where the two meet, there has to be some fairness, and the fairness is that parents with autistic kids who have been damaged by vaccines and those vaccines are on that vaccine table, they ought to be compensated without an adversarial situation evolving through the Department of Justice and Health and Human Services. That is not the case right now. If it means that we have to extract more money from the pharmaceutical companies when they give these vaccines, like a little increase in the amount of the fee that they are paying into the Vaccine Compensation Fund, so be it, because these parents and children have a right to a good life and to be treated fairly. Right now, that is not the case. Mr. Speaker, I hope the leadership in the House and the other body will look favorably upon reevaluating the Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund when we return in January, that they will reevaluate the language in the Department of Homeland Security bill to make sure that it is fair to those parents who have been left out in the cold; and if we do that, then I think we can look at ourselves in the mirror and say we are doing the right thing for parents and especially the children of America. What Do We Know From the Peer-Reviewed Scientific Literature About Thimerosal? Thimerosal is a preservative that is approximately 50 percent ethylmercury and 50 percent thiosalicylic acid (TSA-- sometimes referenced in the literature as a salt). First licensed in 1930 by Eli Lily and Company, it has been used both in the manufacturing process of vaccines and as a preservative in single and multi-dose vials. Over the last 20 years the FDA determined that single dose vials would not require a preservative. In the 1980's the FDA had already acted to pull mercury- containing topical ointments such as merthiolate from the market because they no longer considered them safe. Both components in thimerosal are problematic. Mercury is known to be toxic to the central nervous system and to the renal system. Thiosalicyclic acid is known to cause an allergic response in a significant portion of the population. It is so allergic, that a skin patch test was developed decades ago, but has not been routinely used prior to vaccinations. Below is a summary of published research papers discussing safety issues of thimerosal. 1. We know that in 1947, 31.5 percent of cases of contact dermititis was due to thimerosal. Of these 75 percent was confirmed to be related to the TSA and 12.5 percent confirmed to be related to mercury. We know that the authors of the 1947 paper questioned the wisdom of injecting thimerosal. A 1947 paper reports on a series of case reports. The author makes reference to a 1942 test in which 1 of 6 patients tested were sensitive to merthiolate (16.7 percent). It also references a 1945 test which found that 8 patients were treated for contact dermatitis use related to merthiolate. Six of these were tested for TSA and reacted (75 percent). An 8th patient proved to be sensitive to mercury (12.5 percent). The article goes on to state that 35 percent of contact dermatitis (in general) is due to therapeutic agents, (i.e. from putting a medication on the skin). Of those 35 percent, 90 percent were due to merthiolate. Therefore, it meant that 31.5 percent of contact dermatitis (in general) was due to merthiolate (i.e. TSA and mercury) While much of the focus has been on the mercury component of thimerosal, the articles points to the high level of allergic response due to the TSA component. Given that thimerosal = ethylmercury + TSA, it doesn't really matter whether it is TSA or the mercury that causes the problem. Dr. Vera Stejskal, a noted European researcher testified before the House Committee on Government Reform that is not simply the toxicity of the mercury, but also the sustained allergic response to mercury and TSA that can lead to a systemic response--which can include a swelling of the brain. Notable quotes from paper: ``No eruptions or reactions have been observed or reported to merthiolate internally, but it may be dangerous to inject a serum containing merthiolate into a patient sensitive to merthiolate.'' ``The thiosalicylic acid radical is the usual sensitizing factor in merthiolate sensitivity.'' ``Only one patient who had merthiolate dermatitis gave a negative patch test to thiosalicyclic acid. 2. We know that in 1948 there were frequent reports of adverse reactions related to topical application of thimerosal. A 1948 paper reports on a 1947 case in which a 45-year-old woman suffered multiple reactions to merthiolate applied to her skin prior to surgery. She suffered fever and chills and had small vesicles and erythema in the area of merthiolate application. After her recovery, the patient indicated that the ulcer for which she was being surgically treated appeared after repeated applications of a tincture of merthiolate. Thinking she was treating the skin itch, she applied merthiolate daily. She continued the application until the skin because too raw and painful to continue use--then sought medical care. After the surgery, she developed pruritis in the area of the reaction. Two months later upon an office visit, the patient's pruritis and crusting of the skin continued, while the erythema had almost subsided. The article notes that there are many severe reactions reported following the use of mercurial ointments and a lesser number due to antiseptics containing mercurials, recommended further research to determine if harm would results following its subcutaneous or intravenous injection in skin sensitive individuals. The article also notes that most of the references to reactions to thimerosal are published in dermatology journals which general practitioners would not be reading, and thus not be alerted to the problems. Notable quotes from paper: ``Merthiolate is such a commonly used preservative for biologicals, plasma, cartilage, etc., that it would seem important to determine whether harm would result following its subcutaneous or intravenous injection in skin sensitive individuals.'' ``It seems more logical, therefore, to ascribe most of the reactions of merthiolate to the thiosalicylate rather than the mercuric compound it contains.'' A 1950 research paper published in the New York Academy of Science found that mercury bichloride (which is not merthiolate) was toxic when injected, that it caused dermititis if used on the skin too long, and that it could not be used in chemotherapy. Additionally, this article provides an historical perspective of the use of mercurials to prevent sepsis. It also mentions that much of the early work conducted on these products was inadequate to make the claim. The research conducted for this paper was specifically to disprove the claims of high germicidal and sporicidal activity increasingly being touted in textbooks. 3. A 1963 research publication reported that a patient who is sensitive to merthiolate should not be injected with thimerosal. It notes that a patch test exists--and has existed for decades, but there has never been routine testing of infants or children to determine if there is an allergic response. Allergic responses are often overlooked. While the article states that individuals who are allergic to merthiolate are usually sensitive to the TSA, it also mentions that some are sensitive to the mercurial component. The article also stipulates that in determining who will be sensitized, the frequency the topical ointment is used seems to affect the numbers who become allergic. If this argument upholds, it could be extrapolated to mean that the early and frequent use of thimerosal in childhood vaccines could make newer generations more susceptible to allergic responses to TSA and mercury. The paper reports that patients react differently--there is a dermal and epidermal reaction (possibly a systemic response). Of particular concern from this paper is that if this is true, that with new and increasing recommendations from the CDC to given adults booster shots from childhood immunization and to give flu and other vaccines that adults may begin to suffer similar allergic (and systemic) reactions to thimerosal in vaccines. Notable quotes from paper: ``There is another point of practical significance: does the parental injection of merthiolate-containing fluids cause disturbances in merthiolate-sensitive patients.'' ``It is known that persons that are contact sensitive to a drug may tolerate the same medications internally, but it seems advisable to use a preservative other than merthiolate for injections in merthiolate sensitive people.'' ``Patch and intradermal tests of Merthiolate ``do not produce reactions in normal, nonsensitive persons, according to the literature and my own experience.'' Test results present ``a picture of allergic reaction and corresponds to those reactions seen in contact dermatitis.'' ``It is generally recognized sensitivity to Merthiolate usually is not due to its mercurial component but to the thiosalicylate part of the molecule . . . although some patients who are allergic to Merthiolate also react to other mercurials.'' ``The intradermal injection of Merthiolate from numerous intradermal tests in my cases did not seem to cause any systemic reactions.'' 4. A 1973 report of skin burns resulting from a chemical reaction of thimerosal and aluminum resulted in Lilly adding a new warning to the label in 1973. Through multiple tests it was learned that thimerosal acted as a catalyst to the oxidation of aluminum. Blisters on the skin resulted. It was suggested in this article that thimerosal and aluminum should not be used together. (However, aluminum is another ingredient in many children's vaccines.) Notable quotes from paper: 1972 British Medical Journal reports cases of skin burns resulting from the chemical reaction of thimerosal and aluminum. ``Mercury is known to act as a catalyst and to cause aluminum to oxidize rapidly, with the production of heat.'' The manufacturers who supply us with thimerosal have been informed. 5. A 1972 paper reports on six patients who died as a result of subacute mercury poisoning from merthiolate. The doses of merthiolate were likely 1,000 higher than expected doses. This article is important in that it shows that there is indeed a level in which merthiolate (thimerosal) can be toxic. A dose of 1,000 times the intended dose is now proven to be deadly. (We have not seen any research that indicates the exact dose that it would become toxic.) The LD50 (the dose at which 50 percent of the test animals die) for rats is 60 mg/kg of body weight. The article references the subacute nature of the poisoning--i.e. showing that the death was not rapid, but that death occurred after the cellular enzyme was poisoned by the mercuric ion. The article notes that in chronic poisoning, where small amounts of mercury are ingested over a long period, that the symptoms were mostly neurologic. In immediate forms of poisoning, the kidneys were the affected area. While merthiolate was used in blood plasma products extensively in WWII, it was learned that that a higher concentration of merthiolate resulted in the destruction of red blood cells, which was a noted issue in several of the cases reported in this paper. Notable quotes from paper: ``The case histories of four children and two adults who were accidentally given toxic amounts of Merthiolate are recorded.'' ``Five out of the six patients died, and necropsy showed extensive renal tubular necrosis in each case, and in two, evidence of diffuse intravascular coagulation.'' ``Merthiolate (Thimerosal, Thiomersal) is an organo- mecurial compound widely used as an antiseptic agent. Its main application in medicine has been as a skin antiseptic, and it has also been incorporated as a preservative in attenuated polio and influenza virus preparations. Similarly, vials of antibiotic preparation may contain Merthiolate as a bactericidal agent to allow such vials to be used for several doses.'' ``Toxic effects in man have been confirmed mainly to skin reactions, which on occasions may be severe.'' ``Intravenous Merthiolate has been used in the treatment of subacute bacterial endocarditis with no apparent ill effects (Powell and Jamieson 1931). However, the doses used were very small.'' ``The amount of Merthiolate in each vial was 1,000 times as much.'' ``The LD50 (lethal dose for 50 percent of test population) for Merthiolate in man is unknown. However, these six patients received between two and six times the LD50 for rats (LD50 60 mg/kg).'' 5. In 1982, the FDA published an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to ban the use of thimerosal in OTC products. This FDA generated documents that lists the high level of toxicity of thimerosal in their proposed rule for OTCs. The announcement noted delayed hypersensitivity in 10 of 20 guinea pigs (50 percent) tested indicating that thimerosal is highly allergenic and that it is reasonable to expect humans to be equally allergenic. The report also notes a Swedish study found in healthy subjects the following had hypersensitivity to thimerosal: 10 percent of school children, 16 percent of military recruits, 18 percent of twins, and 26 percent of medical students. The FDA concludes that while it has been suggested that hypersensitivity may be due to the TSA portion of the molecule and not the mercury, that this was not confirmed. They succeeded in their move to ban OTC products with thimerosal. Notable quotes from paper: ``At the cellular level, thimerosal has been found to be more toxic for human epithelial cells in vitro than mercuric chloride, mercuric nitrate, and merbromim (mercurichrom).'' ``It was found to be 35.3 times more toxic for embryonic chick heart tissue than for staphylococcus aureus.'' (1950 study showed that thimerosal was no better than water in protecting mice from potential fatal streptococcal infection.) ``The Panel concludes that thimerosal is not safe for OTC topical use because of its potential for cell damage if applied to broken skin and its allergy potential. It is not effective as a topical antimicrobial because its bacteriostatic action can be reversed.'' 6. Occupational Safety Materials give the following warnings: Primary Physical and Reproduction Effects: Nervous System and Reproduction Effect. Effects of exposure include fetal changes. Exposure in children may cause mile to severe retardation. Hypersensitivity to mercury is a medical condition aggravated by exposure. CERCA Hazardous substance--toxic waste disposal. The MSDS statement states that the primary physical and health hazards include that it is toxic, a mutagen, an allergen, and can have nervous system and reproductive effects. Early signs of mercury poisoning in adults include: narrowing of the visual field and numbness in the extremities. Exposure to mercury in utter may cause mild to severe mental retardation and mild to severe motor coordinating impairment. In the toxicological section it was noted that in rats, an intravenous dose of greater than 45 mg/kg was needed for mortality. 7. A 1973 paper on the toxicology of thimerosal notes, ``as with other chemicals of its generation, information relating to safety and efficacy of thimerosal in animal models is sparse.'' The article reviews the existing animal studies: In mice, all injections of 150 mg of thimerosal per kg of body weight were lethal within 1 hour. A 1937 study performed by Lilly gave 20 mice 30 or 50 mc/kg of a 1 percent solution of thimerosal. The lethal dose of 50 percent of the mice was found to be 40.9 1.2 mg/ kg. A 1945 study was done in mice. Doses ranging from 40-62 mc/ kg of thimerosal was given intravenously. Most deaths occurred 3 days later, however a few mice died as late as 9 days later. The lethal dose of 50 percent was calculated at 55 mg/kg. In a rat study, 45 mc/kg was the tolerated intravenous dose. Autopsy revealed definite kidney lesions, consisting principally of tubular changes, necrosis of the epithelium (membranous tissue composed of one or more layers of cells separated by very little intercellular substance and forming the covering of most internal and external surfaces of the body and its organs), inclusion of masses of debris in the lumen (the inner open space or cavity of a tubular organ, as of a blood vessel or an intestine) and congested and hemorrhagic regions throughout the cortex (the outer layer of an internal organ or body structure, as of the kidney or adrenal gland/the outer layer of gray matter that covers the surface of the cerebral hemisphere). In a rabbit study, 25 mg/kg was usually tolerated dose. Pre-death signs of toxicity included prostration (total exhaustion or weakness; collapse) and diarrhea. Death occurred 1-6 days post-treatment and cause of death was attributable to mercurial poisoning, including kidney and intestinal lesions. Another rabbit study tested 20 or 60 mg/kg intravenous dose of thimerosal. Onset of side effects and death occurred at both doses and varied with dose and rate of injection. Side effects noted were drowsiness, ataxia (loss of the ability to coordinate muscular movement), weight loss, and oliguria (production of an abnormally small amount of urine). Animals receiving a dose of 60 mg/kg showed a progressive fall in serum potassium and an elevation in urinary potassium excretion. Histopathology included kidney tubular necrosis but no glomerular (glomeruli: a tuft of capillaries situated within a Bowman's capsule at the end of a renal tubule in the vertebrate kidney that filters waste products from the blood and thus initiates urine formation) lesions. In a series of studies that tested the oral delivery of thimerosal in rats, the lethal dose of thimerosal was estimated to be greater than 50 mg/kg but less than 100 mg/ kg. Side effects preceding death included ptosis (Abnormal lowering or drooping of an organ or a part, especially a drooping of the upper eyelid caused by muscle weakness or paralysis), chromorhinorrhea (miscolored nasal discharge), poor grooming, and weakness. These studies which originally lasted 7 days were extended 14 days and showed that there is a delayed toxicity in thimerosal. This is also shown in other studies previously discussed. This raises a large number of questions about the lack of safety studies in this area. Toxicity death prior to 3 days in one study only occurred at the 125 mg/kg level. The 50 percent death rate after 7 days was calculated at 88.8 5.7 mg/kg but additional deaths occurred during the second week resulting in a 14 day 50 percent death rate of 72.7 5.4 mg/kg. An intraperitoneal (inside the area that holds the abdominal organs) study on guinea pigs tested injections of varying thimerosal solutions strengths. No abnormal responses were seen at the 0.0125 percent or 0.025 percent. Those treated with 0.05 percent or 0.1 percent evidenced irritation and pain, and autopsy revealed congestion (excessive fluid) and hemorrhage in the peritoneum. Intracutaneous studies in rabbits found that some of the animals became irritated and other did not. In a guinea pig study found similar response and showed that the level of response was dose related. As an extension of the intracutaneous study, a subcutaneous test was done on 3 rabbits. After 24 hours, no irritation was noted on the skin. The animals were sacrificed and examined. A few of the injection sites had caused small sites of hyperemia. The cause of this was unclear (thimerosal or needle puncture of small vessels). A dermal study of rabbits found no dermal irritation. In an ocular study with rabbits, tincture merthiolate (thimerosal, alcohol, and acetone) was found to be an eye irritant, damaging both the iris and the conjunctivia. The study was consistent with other studies on alcohol ocular irritation. In another study of mercuialentis, an ocular study of rats and guinea pigs (30 days) found no corneal toxicity. However, they found measurable levels of mercury in both eyes (test was in one eye) and in peripheral blood of rats. In a subacute toxicity study in dogs given thimerosal intravenously. None of the dogs died from the 2 mg/kg of thimerosal.

Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Mr. Speaker, reserving the right to object, first of all, let me say that I certainly support establishing the Department of Homeland Security. If there is one thing we need to deal with the terrorists and the terrorist threat, it is to make sure that we have a streamlined approach to dealing with the threat. I believe that Tom Ridge, who I believe will be the Secretary of Homeland Security, and others in that Department will do an outstanding job once they get started. So I support very strongly the establishment of a homeland security department. But the thing that bothers me, and the reason I came back to Washington today, to reserve the right to object, is because something was put into the bill that is wrong. I believe that it was put into the bill, because those who were asking that it be put into the bill were unaware of the ramifications of putting it into the bill. So under my reservation, I am going to go into the details of this, and it is going to take a little bit of time, but I think the education of my colleagues is extremely important when we are talking about the thousands and thousands of children in this country that have autism and how their families are struggling to cope with this problem without any help from those who may have caused the damage. So let me start off by saying that when section 1714 to section 1717 were put into the bill at the last minute here in the House, and the gentleman from Texas, my good friend, was the author of this amendment, I was told that the committee of jurisdiction was notified about this amendment. Well, according to the Rules of the House, the Committee on Government Reform and Oversight was the committee of jurisdiction. I am the chairman of that committee and I was not notified. Had I been notified, I would have been down here on the floor debating it very stringently, because we have been studying this issue for 3 years. We have had thousands of pieces of correspondence from parents of children who have been damaged to the point where they cannot speak and cannot live a good life. We have had hearings involving scientists and doctors from all over the world about this subject, and we are the only committee to my knowledge in the Congress that has taken this kind of time and effort to research this problem. Yet, we were not notified about this and the ramifications of this amendment. So what I did when the amendment was found out, and it was over in the Senate by that time because we had passed the homeland security bill, with my vote, in addition to those of my colleagues, I went over there to try to get this amendment out. Well, I found that the only way you could get it out was to bring it back to the House and probably go to a conference committee and, as a result, the homeland security bill might be killed for this session, and we might be dragging this thing on through December. The majority leader in the Senate and the Speaker of the House did not want that to happen. Therefore, my request that we take this out was not accepted. Cloture was voted on, so they went directly to the bill. So I sent out a Dear Colleague letter to all of the Senators. I want to go into some of that a little bit and the reasons why this is such an important issue. In my letter to my colleagues in the Senate, I said, ``Scientists have concluded that there is no causal connection between mercury- containing thimerosal.'' That is an additive that is put into the vaccines that is going into our children. Most people do not know that mercury is being injected or has been injected into our children 25 or 30 times before they go to the first grade in school, and there is a cumulative effect of mercury in the brain. You get a little bit, and it keeps building up because of the fatty tissue in the brain. One shot of mercury may not hurt, with the thimerosal, but the cumulative effect, according to many scientists, does cause neurological damage, including autism. But the fact is, in 2001 the respected Institute of Medicine concluded that a connection between thimerosal, the mercury-containing additive, and autism, while unproven, is biologically plausible. So they said they did not know; they did not know whether it would cause autism or not, but they said it was biologically plausible. Researchers in the State of California concluded this year that there is no statistical explanation for the nearly 300 percent increases in cases of autism in that State. ``It is astounding to see a three-fold increase in autism with no explanation,'' said Dr. Robert Byrd, an epidemiologist who led the study. ``There are a number of things that need to be answered, and we need to rethink the possible causes of autism.'' If we look at this study, we will see here when we started about the late 1980s there was a dramatic increase in the amount of autism in California. That is when we started adding additional vaccines containing thimerosal, the mercury-based additive, preservative, to these vaccines. Another fact: An internal HHS document produced to the Committee on Government Reform during our investigation into vaccine safety described what it referred to as a weak signal in its data link linking thimerosal to neurological disorders: ``Preliminary screening of ICD-9 codes for possible neurologic and renal conditions following exposures to vaccines containing thimerosal,'' that is the mercury, ``before 3 months of age showed a statistical association for the overall category of neurological development disorders and for two conditions within the category, speech delay and attention deficit disorder.'' Fact: If there were no concerns that scientific research would demonstrate a connection between thimerosal and autism, sections 1714 and 1717 would not have been tacked into the Homeland Security Act in the 11th hour without any debate, without anybody knowing about that. Here is some more fiction. Sections 1714 to 1717 do not eliminate the right of vaccine-injured individuals to sue manufacturers of vaccines and their components. Proponents of these provisions have stated that once individuals have gone through the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program they can still choose to file a civil lawsuit. That is false. The reason is, there is a 3-year statute of limitations. Most of these families did not even know about the program, so the 3 years passed and they could not get into it. Therefore, the only recourse they had was to file a suit, a class action suit. So we have thousands of families out there that cannot get into the program, the vaccine compensation program, when their kids have been damaged because the statute of limitations has expired. They are out there with nothing. Their houses are being sold, they are going bankrupt, they are spending all their money and hurting their lives trying to help their kids, and they cannot do it. My grandson is one of them. Fact: ``Thimerosal has now been removed from all childhood vaccines and is no longer a concern.'' That is not true. It is in the flu vaccine they are giving to children. They may have taken it out in the last couple of weeks, but it has been in there. It is in the flu vaccine that we get here in the House. There is a tremendous increase in the number of people that are having Alzheimer's disease, and there is a growing body of evidence in the world of science that one of the contributing factors is the mercury that we are putting into our bodies. They are putting it into adult vaccines still, including the flu vaccine that every Member of this body got this year that took it. I talked to the doctor, the head of health here in the House. When I first talked to him about it 2 or 3 years ago, I said, did you know there is mercury in the vaccines we are getting for flu? He was not aware of it. What it says in the leaflet that we get is thimerosal. Who in the heck knows what thimerosal is. Well, 50 percent of it is mercury. Relating to the argument that it has been removed from pediatric vaccines, the pharmaceutical companies that have already put vaccines out there that have thimerosal in it, it is still on the shelves in the doctors' offices. They may not be manufacturing more with Thimerosal in it, but the doctors that have it in their offices and the pharmacists that have it in their pharmacy are still dispensing it and it is still being used; so we are still injecting mercury into our kids in large quantities. Because the FDA was painfully slow to seek the removal of thimerosal during the 1990s, millions of children across the country were exposed to this mercury-based additive, preservative, at a time when concerns about its health effects were emerging. The legal rights of these children should not be curtailed; yet, they were curtailed. Now, I want to thank publicly, and here the Speaker is going to tell me I cannot do it, but I am going to go ahead anyhow, Senators Snowe, Chaffee, and Collins on the Republican side of the aisle, along with a lot of our Democrat colleagues, who put pressure on the leadership in the Senate to make a concession saying that they would adjust this or take this provision out, at least in part. Announcement by the Speaker pro tempore

Mr. BURTON of Indiana

Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Mr. Speaker, in June 1984, Indian forces invaded the Golden Temple, the most sacred Sikh shrine, and other Sikh Gurdwaras around Punjab, killing 20,000 people. As Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale said, this helped lay the foundation of Khalistan, the Sikh homeland that declared its independence in 1987. Now the police have again invaded the Golden Temple complex on the pretext of searching the three buildings in the complex in connection with the upcoming elections for the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee (SGPC), which oversees all the Gurdwaras in India. The police were accompanied by Indian political officials, including the Chemicals and Fertilizers Minister, Sukhdev Singh Dhindsa. People of all religions and from all over the world have been welcomed to worship at the Golden Temple. Now even members of the SGPC may well be blocked from entering it. Some SGPC workers had a verbal altercation with two of the invading police officials, according to the Tribune newspaper out of Chandigarh. The article reports that SGPC members have already had to sneak into the Golden Temple complex. Mr. Speaker, this is further proof that there is no religious freedom in ``the world's largest democracy.'' India has already been added to our government's list of countries that violate religious freedom. Now sanctions should be implemented to help ensure real religious liberty in India. This is just the latest chapter in a long history of repression of Sikhs by India. Over a quarter of a million Sikhs have been murdered since 1984. More than 52,000 are being held as political prisoners, according to a report by the Movement Against State Repression. Another 50,000 have simply been made to ``disappear.'' The police picked up 50,000 Sikh youth, tortured them, murdered them, declared their bodies ``unidentified'' and secretly cremated them, and refused to hand the remains over to the families. Christians, Muslims, Dalits, and other minorities have seen similar atrocities committed against them, yet the world treats India as a respectable, democratic country. Mr. Speaker, we must stop our aid to India now. We must declare our support for self-determination for the Sikhs of Khalistan, for predominantly Christian Nagaland, for Kashmir, and for everyone in South Asia. The cornerstone of democracy is the right to self- determination. I would like to place the Tribune article on the police invasion of the Golden Temple complex into the Record at this time. I think my colleagues will find it very informative. [lsqb]From the Tribune (Chandigarh), Nov. 11, 2002[rsqb] Police Enters Golden Temple Complex (By Prabhjot Singh) Chandigarh, Nov. 10.--Less than 24 hours before a five- member NDA team, led by union minister Sahib Singh Verma, could fly into the Holy City of Amritsar to oversee the conduct of next Tuesday's annual election to the SGPC executive committee, Punjab policemen in plain clothes entered the Golden Temple complex on the pretext of searching all three serais (inns) there. Accompanying the team would be not only Union Chemicals and Fertilisers Minister, Sukhdev Singh Dhindsa, who is also a SAD General Secretary, but also 100-odd SGPC members owing allegiance to SAD chief Parkash Singh Badal. Though preventive arrests continued throughout the state and Golden Temple complex was put under police siege with the deployment of hundreds of anti-riot policemen in anti-combat gear, some of the Akali leaders, including former Finance Minister Kanwaljit Singh managed to sneak into the sanctum sanctorum. Talking to The Tribune over the telephone, Mr Sukhdev Singh Dhindsa said the names of four NDA observers--Mr Sahib Singh Verma, Mr Thomas (MP, Samata), Mrs D'Souza (MP, Samata), and Mrs Anita Arya (MP, BJP)--have already been cleared, the Union Civil Aviation Minister, Mr Shah Nawaz, is also expected to be a part of the special NDA team to oversee the SGPC elections. The observers and the SGPC members would take a chartered flight from New Delhi to Amritsar tomorrow afternoon. Mr Dhindsa further said that on the basis of the complaint lodged by the Shiromani Akali Dal with the Union Home Minister yesterday, the Union Home Secretary today called Punjab Chief Secretary Y.S. Ratra on the telephone and expressed his ``strong displeasure'' over ``politicalisation of the bureaucracy''. The Chief Secretary reportedly assured the Union Home Secretary that no SGPC member would be stopped from reaching the Golden Temple complex for attending the election meeting. Efforts would be made to facilitate those lodged in jails in one case or the other to attend and vote in the elections. Meanwhile, reports indicate that so far the Punjab police has taken 1,222 Akali workers into custody. Of these 934 belong to Shiromani Akali Dal, 234 to Sarb Hind Shiromani Akali Dal, 50 to Shiromani Akali Dal (Amritsar) and one owes allegiance to Mr Ravi Inder Singh. The remaining three belong to the Mehta faction of the AISSF. Of these, the maximum arrests of the Badal men were made in Sangrur (73), followed by Majitha (64), Tarn Taran (60) and Patiala (62). Rashmi Talwar and Ashok Sethi in their reports from Amritsar said the police in a pre-dawn swoop entered the Golden Temple complex on the pretext of searching all three serais--Guru Nanak Niwas, Guru Hargodbind Niwas and Mata Ganga Niwas. When the police arrived to get the three serais vacated to ensure implementation of the orders, among those evicted were 50 schoolchildren in the age group of six to eight years from Lucknow. The police parties which were headed by Mr Jagdish Khera and Mr R.S. Ghuman, both DSPs, had a verbal altercation with the SGPC workers who resisted the attempts of the raiding party to get the serais vacated. Mr Harbant Singh and Mr Ajaib Singh, Secretary of the SGPC, and personal assistant to the SGPC chief, respectively, refused to budge holding that the orders were not specific to the SGPC and ``devotees'' could not be evicted from a religious complex. The SGPC Chief, Prof Kirpal Singh Badungar, who had to rush to Amritsar from Bathinda, after the police entry into the complex, assailed the government action maintaining that it was a direct attack on the most sacred Sikh shrine and the Congress Government was bent upon disturbing communal peace and harmony. The police officials managed to get computer printouts of the names and addresses of 2,000 devotees staying in the serais. Hundreds of policemen in top anti-combat gear laid a siege to the Golden Temple complex. The mounted police has also been deployed around the complex. Talking to The Tribune over the cellphone, Capt Kanwaljit Singh said that that action of the police in the morning and again in the evening of searching serais and evicting yatris was a serious ``violation of the sanctity of the Golden Temple complex.'' The action of the government amounts to gross interference in the religious affairs of the Sikhs and could lead to serious complications besides disturbing communal harmony and peace in the state.'' He said a number of SGPC members and dal workers had already managed to sneak into the complex. Professor Badungar told newsmen that in case the police entered Teja Singh Samundari Hall on the day of the election meeting, the repercussions would be ``drastic''. He said the government was gripped by a ``fear psychosis'' and its nervousness was evident from the desperate steps it was taking. He maintained that the national and international media would be permitted to cover the executive committee elections as he disapproved on any NDA observers to oversee the elections. No other SGPC employee would be allowed inside the meeting hall. The SGPC chief said that non-bailable warrants issued against former SGPC chief Jagir Kaur by a Kapurthala court was an indication of the desperation of the state government. Meanwhile, Mr. Sukhdev Singh Bhaur, General Secretary, SHSAD supported the orders issued by the District Magistrate but held that these orders should be applicable in case of ``bad elements'' and not the devotees. The SHSAD was ready for a truce with Mr. Parkash Singh Badal provided he agreed to apologize at Akal Takht and accepted Bhai Ranjit Singh as Jathedar of Akal Takht. He claimed that 50 SGPC members were strongly behind the SHSAD. Senior Akali leader and close aide of Mr. Parkash Singh Badal, Capt Kanwaljit Singh claimed that the SAD has formulated its secret strategy to bring all 120 SGPC members to Teja Singh Samundri Hall on November 12 to elect the President and the executive committee. Talking to newsmen this evening at Bhai Gurdas Hall after managing to enter the city in disguise. He said the reign of terror unleashed by the Amarinder Singh government on Akali leaders and workers were trampling upon their democratic rights. Capt Kanwaljit Singh said Mr. Badal, along with all 120 members, would land at Rajasansi Airport tomorrow for the SGPC general house election meeting. Party leaders and workers would ensure that all SGPC members manage to enter the Golden Temple complex on that day. He claimed that the ex-parte disqualification of SGPC members by the SGJC was likely to be set aside by the Punjab and Haryana High Court tomorrow. Discounting the rumors of a patch-up between Mr. Badal and Mr. Tohra, Capt Kanwaljit Singh said there was no scope for any compromise. The Badal candidate would win hands down, he asserted. The arrival of the Jathedar of Akal Takht, Giani Joginder Singh Vedanti, here this evening has raised speculation about an appeal being made by him for a patch-up between the two Akali stalwarts to avoid a confrontation even as the Congress Government has queered the pitch with heavy deployment of the police around the complex.