We are going to talk about Abu Ghraib and we note here that it's shown twice in red and blue. Blue shows the total number of detention facilities that are run by the Iraqis, which the 800th MP Brigade also is providing security for. Abu Ghraib, you may know, it has both Iraqi detainees, criminals, as well as detainees from the U.S., which are blue, on the outskirts of Baghdad.

Next.

The period that we're looking at covers from July of 2003 to February of this year. And I show this chart on the number of detainees throughout the country because when General Sanchez took command in June, the expectation was that the number of detainees would decrease, not increase. He was moved from a two-star command of a division, the First Armored Division, to command a 180,000-person Combined Joint Task Force. He was given a mission of conducting stability and support operations. In fact, what happened was he was continually attacked. It was not stable. He was given a mission of supporting Ambassador Bremer's CPA, the Coalition Provisional Authority. He was given the mission of help to rebuild the country with respect to that. And all the while, while he was being attacked, the number of detainees was growing.

At Abu Ghraib, you can see that they continued to grow, even as they fell off, because we collapsed a number of the detention facilities. But during the period of the fall, the intensity of the attacks increased and more detainees came into the facilities.

Next one.

I'll focus this now on Abu Ghraib specifically. Again, the dark purple or blue is the general population, the total number of detainees. The light blue, the bars here, which amounts to about 1,200, were those whom we specifically thought had military intelligence value which warranted further interrogation. But the number of interrogators, shown in green, did not increase commensurate with the number of people that they had to interrogate.

Now, I could plot the same thing for the number of military policemen that were securing these facilities.

So you see a picture of a growing number of detainees, a requirement for more intelligence because of the attacks that were taking place, and a requirement that was put on the backs of fewer people to accomplish that mission. It was a tough mission.

I would also describe to you -- and if I could have the next chart -- Abu Ghraib, which this is an overhead photograph of the prison facilities, a rather sorted reputation under Saddam Hussein; 12,000 people could be detained within the walls of that. There were about 7,000 at the maximum that actually were there, but much of this facility had been looted and destroyed previously through the occupation during the time of July '03 till February '04.

Most of the detainees were held in tents, a few of them were moved, of the high value detainees, to Tier 1A and 1B, often referred to as the hard site. They were the old detention facilities which were being reconstructed, and these are where the interrogations took place; it is also where most of the abuses took place.

We found that to be relevant because when people are out here in the tents, it was hot and it was general open during most of that period and you could see what was happening. But in the fall, when they were moved into 1A and 1B, those were closed buildings and you could not see what was happening, and we believe that that contributed to the environment which led to some of the abuses.

Here is what we found, and I really hesitate to get into the numbers, but this is what is in our report and what we found and it tries to categorize it in a way, which I hope is understandable. First, with the Military Intelligence personnel, we found that 23 uniformed military personnel were alleged to be involved with abuse. In addition, four contractors, people who were hired to be part of the interrogation, were also in that category, for a total of 27.

We also found, however, that six Military Intelligence personnel, while they were not alleged to be involved in it, knew about it. They either saw it, or they saw the pictures of it, but they failed to report it. In addition, in that category, were two contractors. But we did not stop our investigation with just the Military Intelligence personnel. We looked at others, as well.

And we went back to the military police, who were providing the security forces. Seven of them have previously been charged -- if I can get this to work. But we also found that three more were newly identified as alleged to be part of the abuse and one of them, in addition, failed to report. We also found that medical personnel, the medics who were there to help the people, that there were two of those persons who also failed to report.

So our report was not limited. It took us to where we found abuses taking place or failures taking place. Our findings are summarized here. First, there was no single cause of the abuses that we have categorized. There were multiple pieces that fed this -- doctrine, training, resources -- all contributed. But the primary cause for individual misconduct: lack of discipline and a failure on the part of leaders. None of those are good news stories for our Army.

On the other side of the more than 2,000 people who were there at the prison, most of them were doing the right thing. They were taking care of people humanely. They were providing them the best resources they could, equivalent to what they had, whether it was sharing their meals ready-to-eat or whether it was sharing clothing or sharing medical capability. So they did abide by what they were supposed to do, honorably, and in accordance with law and regulation.

We also found, as you have heard reported, and we could document that there were cases of what we would refer to as the "ghost detainees of eight." Likely, that number is not accurate because if it were, it's not in the category of ghost detainee, we would have accurate reports which we could use. They are labeled in that category because people were brought to the detention facility, but not in accordance with the International Red Cross where there are names registered.

That's against our policies and regulations. That shouldn't have been done, and we are asking for that to be investigated further.

In all of these things that happened, our report is turned over to the appropriate commanders. Most of these people are no longer assigned to the unit in which the actions occurred. They're in different organizations now. And so, those commanders will get the report that we have with all the substantiated documentation, and they will take the appropriate action.

For the civilian contractors, those reports will be turned over to the Department of Justice, outside of our military organization, for appropriate action. For those agencies that are not in the Department of Defense, we have asked the Department of Defense Inspector General and other government agency inspector generals to take action on further investigations and actions that need to be taken.

So we have looked widely and we have looked in-depth and what we have done is an objective review of what happened and taken actions to fix it.

I will tell you that the three of us just returned from Abu Ghraib and it is very different today than when this report was written. There are fewer than 2,500 detainees there, not more than 6,000. They are living in good conditions with the correct sanitary, hygiene and health conditions. They are living in -- they are being brought to interrogation cells which are supervised and being conducted in accordance with regulations and policies, and the International Commission (sic) of the Red Cross is part of that.

They are watching everything that we're doing and reporting, and that is being listened to by Major General Jeff Miller, who is in charge of the operations. And one of the things we found is that there was no single person in charge, where today there is, and he knows that he's accountable for what happens there to the detainees and to all the interrogations that occur, a very different case than when our report was written.

Our training has been improved. Our certifications have been improved. Our doctrine is being rewritten. And the people who failed are being held accountable.

Again, I would remind you that we are focusing on people who did wrong. I'm not happy about that. I'm not happy that I'm standing here to talk to you about that. It will be addressed. But there are thousands upon thousands of people who are doing the right thing, trying to help rebuild the country and give people the right conditions in which to live.

With that, we'll open up for questions.

COL. MACHAMER: Yes. As a reminder, please wait for the microphone and identify yourself by name and news organization. And we will take one question from New York.

QUESTION: Guillamette Faure, French newspaper Le Figaro.

In the report of Mr. Schlesinger yesterday, he was mentioning 300 cases currently under investigation. Can you tell us more about it?

GEN. KERN: Not Secretary Schlesinger's report, but I can tell you that we gave all of our investigation to him. And so he listened to all of our briefings and has access to all of our reports. The same is true with Admiral Church and the report yet to be published.

The 300 is all-encompassing. What we reported on here are 44 cases of different instances where we felt there was some violation. Now, if you try to add 44 and get to those numbers there, remember those charts I showed were numbers of people, and each of those 44 cases, which General Fay can describe to you in great detail because he has looked at every single one of them, there were some people who were involved in more than one instance but there were a total of 44 instances and that's a sector, a segment of the 300 which is being reported by Secretary Schlesinger.

George, you may want to add a comment there.

MAJ. GEN. FAY: Just, sir, I concur. I concur with what you've stated, sir, is that 300 referred to in the Schlesinger report or the total number of cases that are still being looked into, our report was specifically on Abu Ghraib, and specifically, we've dealt with those 44 instances of abuse that General Kern just mentioned.

COL. MACHAMER: Let's go to the front row.

QUESTION: My name is Said Arikat from Al Quds daily newspaper.

General, you say that primarily it's a lack of discipline and leadership. Also, the Schlesinger report says it goes all the way up. But it seems that the General Sanchez was not reprimanded. He is not held obligated in any way. Could you explain to us as why that is, sir?

And, second, what -- how do you classify these detainees? You say that there are 2,500 detainees now at Abu Ghraib. What are their classifications?

Thank you.

GEN. KERN: First, we classify them all as detainees, and that's as opposed to during combat operations, if you capture somebody who is part of the military operation, we refer to them as enemy prisoners of war. And so when the hostilities were declared at an end and we changed into a different phase people, then, who were caught in many of these actions against both Iraqis and U.S. were classified as detainees.

The interrogation process then has to determine if there's a criminal detainee, in which case, now that we have an Iraqi Government established, they are turned over to them for justice, or whether they were involved in military operations against U.S. forces, for which we then conduct another set of interrogations because we are trying to determine who is attacking both the Iraqis and our forces that are trying to establish stability.

So that is the categorization process and why we refer to them as detainees.

You had one other question, sir.

QUESTION: Yes, sir. But to clarify this point, I mean, are you suggesting, sir, that you could hold them for perpetually --

GEN. KERN: No.

QUESTION: -- you know, in this kind of state of limbo or --

GEN. KERN: No, no.

QUESTION: Will there be charge, or prison or --

GEN. KERN: There is a board which meets regularly now, and I will tell you it wasn't meeting regularly back in the earlier time frame, and that number that was almost 7,000 has been reduced to 2,500 because the majority of those people have been freed and they've gone through a process of review. If we found that they had committed a crime against the state of Iraq, they were turned over to the other side of the prison, which remember I showed you there's two pieces to it now, and in fact, 1A and 1B are now totally being run by the Iraqi Government, and they are taken to the Iraqi civil courts for whatever justice they deem appropriate.

So this process of review is ongoing every single -- I won't say every single day, but multiple times a week right now, and that's how the number has been reduced from 6,200 down to something around 2,400 when we were there a couple of weeks ago.

Now, let me go back to your General Sanchez question. We looked very hard and very critically at the roles of different people, and specifically General Jones was asked to look at people outside of the boundaries of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade. The senior person there is a colonel.

As we did that, General Jones very specifically was asked to address the question, "Were they culpable in the crimes that were committed?" And the answer that he came back with was no. Were they responsible for the conditions, the resourcing of those missions? The answer was, as a commander of the Combined Joint Task Force, yes. And so we are critical of their leadership role but not on their culpability of committing a crime.

General Jones.

LT. GEN. JONES: That's very true and that's a very good question. Unlike General Kern, I've just been in the military a little over 34 years so I'm a little bit more of a rookie. But I will tell you, I've shared a lot of the same experiences that commanders in the organizations are going through in this very complex environment as they envision to be going into a stability and support operation and found themselves still in conflict with a faceless enemy.

I will tell you that there are three things I approach this with. The first is: What were the direct responsibilities of the chain of command above the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade direct in terms of them executing their mission, and did they give proper guidance, clear and concise guidance, and did they resource them to that mission?

In this case in particular, obviously, the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade was about two echelons below General Sanchez. They did work as the separate brigades normally do for a headquarters this size for the deputy commanding general on direct oversight. And I found that, between the deputy commanding general and the commander, they could have provided more guidance and as more in terms of a mission versus a commission in the culpability aspect, because both brigade commanders were new in the summer of 2003 and they probably should have gave them more guidance and counsel in the execution of the mission they were given.

COL. MACHAMER: Let's go to the Toronto Star.

QUESTION: General, it's Tim Harper from the Toronto Star.

I have two questions, one deals with the numbers again. Based on your findings, are you able to provide us with the number of individuals who have not been charged, but based on your findings, should or could be charged criminally?

GEN. KERN: The answer is, yes, our report is specific to the individuals and that is what is referred to their commanders. And we have tried, in those charts I have showed you, to categorize those who have already been charged versus the new ones we found that we think require further action.

QUESTION: And seven have been charged?

GEN. KERN: That's correct.

QUESTION: So we could take your numbers and subtract seven?

GEN. KERN: Yes, but I'm always hesitant of numbers. There have been so many different ways that these have been categorized over the past few months, and that what I'd ask you to do is just kind of refer to that chart that we provided to you as to most clarity.

There are people who we're also charging for other reasons who are not in the category of abuse, okay, so that is not limiting to the number of people that we're holding accountable for what was going on.

QUESTION: Could I ask about the "ghost detainees," the eight instances?

GEN. KERN: Sure.

QUESTION: The point of a ghost detainee is what, exactly? Is that so that -- does this indicate premeditated abuse? Is that why --

GEN. KERN: No --

QUESTION: And before you answer that, were they also -- were these individuals moved around to escape detection?

GEN. KERN: If I were to be very precise in it, I probably wouldn't have to describe them as a "ghost detainee." That's one of the issues.

Our regulations and the International Commission (sic) of the Red Cross, in support of the Geneva Conventions, tell us that if a person is to be detained in our facilities that they are to be registered. And so what we found, first, is that there were at least eight instances of people who were brought in there and not registered, and we've asked that to be further investigated to try to get to some of the questions which you asked as to what was really going on so that we don't put our soldiers in a position of, "What do I do with this person who was just brought here today?"

The second issue is that there is one case where a detainee is brought there and not registered, who dies. He is brought there in pretty bad condition to begin with. Whether he could have been saved or not, I don't know. But if he had gone through our normal registration process, he would have had a medical review and we would have had some opportunity to at least answer that question. And I cannot answer that to you so we've asked for further investigation.

QUESTION: Joyce Karam from Al Hayat newspaper.

We heard today Senator Kerry -- we heard today Senator Kerry asking directly for the resignation of Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for the same findings that you state here, which is leadership failure. We also heard members of the Congress calling for a non-partisan -- sorry, bipartisan, kind of similar to September 11 Commission, to be established and look further into the Abu Ghraib case.

Would you recommend these steps?

GEN. KERN: First, I'm not going to comment on what Senator Kerry had to say, not during an election year, and I'm not going -- I'm not permitted to do that.

Secondly, the numbers of the people who are going to be investigated, and if you remember that very first chart that I showed to you of the number of investigations that are ongoing, represent, at this point, I would say, hundreds of thousands of hours of very thorough investigation.

So before I would recommend that another investigation be opened up is that people look at what has already been reported and make a determination. Remember that the last report, which I said will come out on the 20th, we think on the 20th of September, by Admiral Church, is to look at what's been left out, referred to as the gaps and the seams.

And so after that's done, it's not clear to me what else is to be left to be investigated. We have been as absolutely as objective as we can be in our report and we are providing that. I wouldn't be standing here today if that were not the case. And so it's a -- I don't know what further is to be gained by it.

But I also do know that our Constitution requires us to report to our Congress, as directed, and they are the one who provide us the direction that we get outside of our Executive Branch, direction from our Commander-in-Chief. And so we will wait till they make their final judgments on after looking at all the reports.

COL. MACHAMER: Right there on the end.

QUESTION: Okay, Mohamed El-sethouhi, Egyptian Television, Nile News Channel.

Regardless of what Senator Kerry has said, Schlesinger's report talks about indirect responsibility by Secretary Rumsfeld, the civilian leadership and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Do you agree on this conclusion? And does it mean that any of them has to step down?

And the other question I will follow up later, if I can wait.

GEN. KERN: I really am not in a position to make that judgment, but I would tell you that our report, I think, was very thorough, that we looked at policies and directives throughout the chain of command and what impact they had on it. So we did not ignore those things that have happened outside of the boundaries of Abu Ghraib prison.

We believe that many of those lacked clarity and the resources to establish and run that operation as we think it should be, which is the way it's being run today. Those resources have been provided. It just took a very long time to get there.

Tony, I don't know if you want to --

LT. GEN. JONES: Well, I would just say, I think Secretary Schlesinger was also asked that same question yesterday and he responded in a news conference whether or not he thought the culpability of Secretary Rumsfeld was such that he would recommend that, and he said no.

QUESTION: And this is the same answer you are saying now? Is your answer today that, the answer you gave?

LT. GEN. JONES: No, I'm giving you (inaudible). That's beyond the scope of my investigation and my limits of authority.

QUESTION: The other question which I wanted to say, the seven soldiers were charged with these crimes, most of them are talking about following orders from their leaders and MIs. To what extent can you substantiate these claims?

GEN. KERN: I'm not going to make any specific comments about ongoing investigations which are open cases, one, because I want them to be completed in the process, due process, as we describe our system.

We did find cases which are in our report where both -- where some of the Military Intelligence personnel did give direction, or at least suggestion, to Military Police personnel, and that is very explicitly outlined in our report.

George, you may want to comment further.

MAJ. GEN. FAY: Yes, sir. Within those 44 instances that we discussed before, there are instances in there where you can see where the Military Intelligence personnel and the Military Police personnel did, in some very few instances, collude with each other and inappropriately treated detainees.

COL. MACHAMER: Okay, we have time for one more question and we'll go to the middle there,.

Thomas.

QUESTION: Thomas Gorguissian, Al Nahar, Lebanon.

General, you mentioned in November and October time period that a number of detainees are growing and the number of the interrogators are not enough to interrogate. Is this kind of -- not justification -- understanding of what was happening? Because I don't know how many numbers of interrogators were there.

Related to that, it was always mentioned in the news reports that the role of the contractors was obvious in this abuses of cases, and in the kind of -- with your experience, I am just trying to figure out, as a civilian person, this inter -- this type of interrogations, does it help to get intelligence or not?

GEN. KERN: The answer is clearly [non-abusive interrogations] help to get intelligence. Most of the contractors, not all, were fairly senior in terms of having experience in the military as interrogators for Military Intelligence, and so they came into it with a background that added. So, yes, they did contribute to it.

The challenge, then, is to get a team that works together that does things the right way. And what we have asked all of our commanders to look at very carefully, if you're going to use contractors, you had better read the contract very carefully and make sure that they, by their contracts, have the same requirements as our soldiers in abiding by law if we're going to put them under the same circumstances.

It is also one of the challenges that most of our Military Intelligence interrogators are fairly junior personnel and the contractors tend to be older, senior, and so you put these two together and you are looking for something to happen which created some tension in some cases.

But, as we reported, we found a number of contactors whom we believe should be further investigated and they are being reported to the Department of Justice, just as if we had found them as a soldier, which we're referring to our commanders for further action.

George, do you want to add anything?

MAJ. GEN. FAY: No, sir. I believe you've accurately covered it and covered it substantially.

GEN. KERN: Let me close by thanking you for your time today. I started by saying that I have had a fairly long career that's been focused around values, and I've always been very proud to meet with the foreign press or any other members of any other countries who have spoken very highly about the behavior of American soldiers.

Today has been an exception, where I'm reporting to you violations that occurred, but I believe that our American justice system will do the right thing. I believe these people who are guilty of any crimes will be found to be guilty in our justice system.

I also don't believe that we should convict people who aren't. And so we've been very careful in trying to draw the lines as to whom we found to be culpable versus whom we found to be responsible for the conditions.

I believe we've been fairly harsh both on our people in uniform, our commanders, as well as the junior personnel and the civilians. And our report should be read in the context of trying to do the right thing to correct those things which went wrong.

But I also am reminded by the number of trips that I've made to the region that every time I go there, there are more lights that are on, there are more cars on the road, there is more commerce that is ongoing and there are more people moving around, that there is a government there today that didn't exist a few months ago and that there are elections which are projected, both in Afghanistan in October and Iraq in January, to allow people to make their choices about how they think they should be ruled.

We will fix our problems and I'm very proud of the work that those soldiers have done and that our people, who are both contractors and civilians, are doing to help rebuild the country. And if I could have only told you the latter part of the story I would feel very good, but we do believe in telling you the right thing and the whole thing, so we're telling you the whole story.
Thank you.

COL. MACHAMER: Gentlemen, thank you.