So I am going to give a legislator's response and then yield to the former Cabinet member.

You want to know if there is an infectious disease epidemic beginning to spread in the country.

But we are not--I mean, one of the major recommendations that comes out of this is that we still have not figured out how to leverage the ingenuity and innovation of the pharmaceutical sector of our economy to get involved in developing…

So, to a certain extent, probably the wrong way to describe it, we backed into the recommendation that the Vice President be the leader of this effort.

the threat of a bioterrorist attack is greater than it has been

I think it is critically important that this work not stop at this point where we are just looking at what is happening within our borders.

I hope that some of you on the Committee and the Committee itself will think about taking whatever parts of this report seem sensible and necessary to you and become leaders in the Senate and Congress and seeing it through to…

We think that we are wasting money on BioWatch, to put it bluntly.

It was a small step for mankind but a large step for Congress.

I had the same impression that you did, that the WHO did not respond as well or as quickly as we would have liked.

the divisions between human health and animal health or human disease and animal disease are artificial.

we should give this responsibility to the Vice President of the United States

I think that Vice President Biden might be challenged and intrigued by this possibility and want to see if in his last year in office he can bring this together to work better.

The ideal would be a mass departure from the camp.

I recall, early in this administration, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and his warning to our Government that then- Prime Minister Maliki was, quote, 'not our friend,' but, rather, an Iranian sympathizer under Tehran's influence.

I think we would be derelict and disloyal to our own national values if we did not find better ways, overt and covert, to support democratic opposition to the dictatorial regime in Tehran.

we ought to put aside the nuclear agreement that has been reached

This requirement of renouncing membership in an organization that is no longer considered a threat or a terrorist organization by any means... seems to me to be very un-American.

America's supposed to be about the right, liberty--the right to life and freedom of individuals.

The Iranian regime remains among the world's most consistent threats to global peace and stability.

Well, yes. I was a soldier. I wore a uniform, but I wasn't in a cult.

We ought to compartmentalize that agreement also--that nuclear agreement. We ought to put it over there and not let it stop us from confronting what they're doing in Syria, continuing the sanctions for human rights violations in Iran and…

I think it would show leadership, it would show some responsibility in this.

I think it's a bad agreement, but--and we'll see whether it actually is adhered to--but, whatever one thinks of the agreement, the Islamic Republic of Iran has sort of put it in a box, and they haven't changed anything else about their…

What does the plight of these 2,400 Iranian dissidents, who are opponents of the dictatorial regime in Tehran; what does it say to us about larger policy questions for the United States in the region?