The 71-year-old defense chief did appear weary, however. He has weathered three lengthy rounds of questioning from congressional committees over the past several days. After taking questions aboard his plane for nearly an hour he called a sudden halt, saying his voice was giving out.

He fiercely defended the Pentagon's response to the revelations of U.S. guards at the Abu Ghraib prison having subjected Iraqi prisoners to sexually humiliating treatment and photographing it.

"The garbage that you keep reading — about cover-up and the Pentagon doing something to keep some information from people — is unfair, inaccurate and wrong," he said. "And if I find any evidence that it's true, I'll stop it."

Rumsfeld also predicted that the abuse scandal would get worse in the days ahead.

"More bad things will come out, unquestionably," he said without being specific. "And time will settle over this and we'll be able to make an assessment of what the effect has been" on the effort to stabilize Iraq. "It clearly has not been helpful. It has been unhelpful."

He went on to complain bitterly about the Arab media's coverage of U.S. operations in Iraq.

"We have been lied about, day after day, week after week, month after month for the last 12 months in the Arab press." He specifically mentioned the al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya satellite TV networks.

In a separate interview, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who runs the prison system in Iraq, defended his role in advising U.S. authorities last fall on how to set up a detention and interrogation system that would produce useful intelligence on people involved in the insurgency.

"I'm absolutely convinced we laid down the fo undations for how you detain people humanely ," he said. Miller said he plans to reduce the prisoner population at Abu Ghraid from the 3,800 who are there now to as few as 1,500 by June 15. In January, there were about 7,000 prisoners there, he said.

Among his first responses to the international outcry over the abuse photos, Rumsfeld sent Vice Adm. Albert T. Church, the Navy's top investigative officer, to the U.S.-run prison camp for terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, last week. Church, who accompanied Rumsfeld on his trip to Iraq, told reporters en route from Washington that he found no major problems at that prison in Cuba.

"The directions of the secretary of defense with respect to the humane treatment of detainees and the interrogation techniques were being carried out, as best we could determine," Church said. "We found minor infractions involving contact with detainees, and we documented eight of those."

Of the eight, four were violations by military police soldiers who guard the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, three were violations by interrogators and one was a barber who gave a detainee an "unauthorized haircut" — a Mohawk-style cut that Church said amounted to humiliating the prisoner.

One of the violators, who punched a detainee in handcuffs, was punished by having his rank reduced, Church said.

Church said he felt confident in saying there currently are no major lapses in the humane treatment of Guantanamo prisoners, but he added that he could not be 100 percent sure because he took sworn testimony from only 43 people there, in addition to reviewing medical records of 100 detainees.

"We found no evidence of current abuse — again I underline 'current,"' he said.

Church was at Guantanamo Bay for two days last week. An assistant took a one-day look at the situation at the brig at Charleston Naval Station, S.C. Church did not mention what was found there.