The Secretary of Commerce of the U.S.A. made a bogus decision in declaring that chasing and setting purse-seine nets around dolphins had "no significant impact" on their populations. The Secretary based his conclusions upon a special study conducted by the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) and a special Peer Review Committee. Now that the report has been made public, it is clear that the facts were simply ignored out of political expediency. (The Secretary's anti-dolphin decision was praised by GreenpeaceUSA and Center for Marine Conservation, which organizations seem determined to stick by the U.S. Adminstration position come what may.) The following paragraph is the final one in the full report to Congress from the NMFS on the issue of the impact of setting nets on dolphins in the ETP tuna fishery: "In summary, evidence from a combination of research vessel estimates of absolute abundance and tuna vessel estimates of relative abundance and fishery mortality indicate that during the past decade there has been a failure to recover as expected by both the northeastern offshore spotted dolphin and eastern spinner dolphin stocks. Our first examination of a large amount of data on the region's oceanography disclosed no indication of a regime shift or other large-scale change that conceivably could contribute to this failure. A review of literature on stress in mammals suggested that fishery-caused stress is a plausible contributor to such a failure. These latter two observations do not provide 'proof' that the tuna purse seine fishery is the cause of the failures to recover but neither do they dismiss it as a possible cause." The report dismisses many of the claims of the IATTC, Center for Marine Conservation, and GreenpeaceUSA, as well as calling into question the action of the Secretary of Commerce in making his finding that setting nets on dolphins causes no significant adverse impacts on dolphins. The report also points out the lack of cooperation by the foreign tuna industry in the necropsy study, and emphasizes that any other explanations for the lack of recovery of dolphins are only hypothetical (the three-member Peer Review Committee concurred strongly on this point). The report further states at one point in the Discussion and Conclusion Section: "The data are not entirely conclusive, nor will they ever be so, even with many additional years of information." The USA's oldest and original Greenpeace, proudly unaffiliated with Greenpeace USA