Naseer Al-Nahr, Arab News

BAGHDAD, 14 May 2004 — US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld paid an unannounced visit to Iraq yesterday and told US troops they were doing a good job. He also visited the Abu Ghraib prison at the center of the scandal over tortured detainees.

“Don’t let anyone tell you America is what’s wrong with the world, because it isn’t,” Rumsfeld said at Abu Ghraib west of Baghdad. “We’ll get through this tough period, let there be no question.”

Rumsfeld told the soldiers that he and Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, had come to “look you folks in the eye and tell you you’re terrific. What you’re doing is important. It is noble work.”

“It’s been a body blow for all of us,” Rumsfeld acknowledged of the scandal ignited by the publication of photographs taken by guards at Abu Ghraib.

They showed Iraqi prisoners in humiliating sexual poses, cowering before barking dogs, made to stand balanced on a box with wires attached to their privates.

Rumsfeld got a frosty reception from Iraqi detainees as he toured the prison. Hundreds of them watched from behind a concertina-wire perimeter fence, some of them showing a thumbs-down gesture while others held aloft a tattered Iraqi flag.

He arrived just hours after the military reported that a US soldier had been killed and another wounded in a roadside bomb attack on a convoy in Baghdad.

During his visit the US-led coalition said a US marine had died Wednesday of wounds he suffered during security operations in Iraq’s western Al-Anbar province.

The latest deaths took to 777 the number of American troops killed since the start of the US-led invasion of Iraq in March last year.

Myers said he did not believe the Iraqi prisoners scandal had undermined the moral justification for the war in Iraq. However, the Vatican said Pope John Paul II would tell President George W. Bush that it was dividing humanity on the basis of religions when the two men meet in early June.

Senior officials of the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference “strongly condemned the torture of Iraqi prisoners by occupation forces” in Abu Ghraib, during a meeting at OIC headquarters in Jeddah.

The Muslim World League, based in Makkah, voiced “deep pain at ... the dreadful torture,” according Saudi Press Agency.

Neither statement mentioned the video of the young American who went missing in Iraq, Nicholas Berg, being decapitated by a group of masked men that was posted on an Islamist website linked to the Al-Qaeda terror network on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, the commander of US forces in Iraq Gen. Ricardo Sanchez said there were intelligence reports that Abu Mussab Al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian linked to Al-Qaeda, carried out the murder of American Nicholas Berg. A CIA official later said there was a “high probability” Zarqawi killed Berg.

Meanwhile, Bulgarian Foreign Minister Solomon Passy said during a visit to Warsaw that his country’s troops would stay in Iraq until the job is done.

— Additional input from agencies