Mr. Chair, if you look in our report, we do explain at one point how we did that. For this particular report, “Fortitude Under Fatigue”, which has to do with PTSD and OSI, as I said I have a team with different backgrounds who visited about 10 bases just for this particular issue, and we do other things. They met with about 500 people in interviews and so on and reviewed 600 documents, documents that existed also on all of this.
We make it a duty to base everything we do on facts, it has to be factual. I do not tolerate from people in our office “my impression”, “it seems”, or “it appears”. What are the facts? A lot of comments or a lot of the returns that we get from those interviews and so on, if we feel they're not substantiated or supported by a fact, we'll discard them. We don't use them in our intellectual analysis or rationalization afterwards. When we have all the facts, we come up with findings, and obviously sometimes it translates into conclusions, and then we look at what kind of recommendation we can bring forward to correct the unfairness that's there.
In this recommendation, like any other organization, we're not perfect, but what we tell the chain of command is they should.... When we look in the files, or we're doing an investigation, I have my full resources of my office to look at that. This in fact should help any leader, because I know they're all very busy and they now have a specialized independent entity that can look at all this and make some recommendations.
We do cover all the grounds. We're not medical experts. We do interview a lot of doctors and so on. A lot of comments you see in the report come from doctors themselves who tell you the problems they are facing. You've heard former surgeon general, Commodore Jung, testify on this. They do face similar problems to what we raise in our report. So, you're right, we try very hard to base everything on facts. If people question things, we can provide the documents, the interviews we did, and not just one interview, but we have to cross-reference them over many other testimonies.