ARAB-US RELATIONS - Jun 1 - US Warns Countries Not To Aid Zarqawi.

Def Sec Rumsfeld warns Iraq's neighbours that any country offering aid to the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, will be guilty of helping someone "with blood on his hands". In a news briefing at which he vigorously defended US policy in Iraq and American treatment of detainees, Rumsfeld said Zarqawi, who was reported to have been wounded recently, was probably in Iraq. "Were a neighbouring country to take him in and provide medical assistance or haven for him, they obviously would be associating themselves with a major linkage in the Al Qaeda network", Rumsfeld said, in what seemed to be a veiled threat to Syria. He did not mention Syria by name, but the Bush administration has complained bitterly that Syria is not doing enough to stop men and money from flowing into Iraq to aid the insurgency there. Moreover, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen Richard Myers, said Zarqawi, who is believed to have been wounded recently, is probably "in western Iraq, near the Syrian border". Iraq borders Syria, Iran, Jordan, Kuwait, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. The Sunday Times of London, citing an insurgent commander it did not name, said this week that Zarqawi might have sought medical attention in Iran. Tehran denied the report. When asked if there would be consequences for any country aiding Zarqawi, a Jordanian who is believed to be behind numerous kidnappings and beheadings in Iraq, Rumsfeld replied somewhat obliquely. "Oh, I think what I said was fairly clear", he said, adding that any country providing medical aid or haven "to a leading terrorist" would be contributing to the deaths of many people. "And that's something that people would want to take note of". The White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, refused to go beyond Rumsfeld's remarks after being asked whether the Bush administration believed Syria was aiding Zarqawi. "We continue to have concerns when it comes to Syria, and Syria allowing its territory to be used by those who seek to carry out attacks inside Iraq, and we've expressed those concerns", McClellan said. Rumsfeld and Myers wholeheartedly defended the conduct of US troops in Iraq, and they insisted that detainees there, as well as at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba, were being well treated on the whole, despite occasional abuses. To compare the detention unit at Guantanamo Bay to the Soviet-era gulag, as the rights group Amnesty International recently did, is "reprehensible" and "cannot be excused", Rumsfeld said. The secretary said all instances of prisoner abuse had been investigated and prosecuted aggressively, and that some major newspapers were guilty of "repeating the same erroneous assertions and recycling the same stories" about abuse of prisoners. He said nearly all the 68,000 detainees who have been in custody since the terror attacks of Sep 11, 2001, have nothing to complain about.