Middle Eastern and Central Asian nations played a role in the network run by the U.S.Central Intelligence Agency and European governments were aware or participated in the operation, the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe said.

"It is now clear -- although we are still far from having established the whole truth -- that authorities in several European countries actively participated with the CIA in these unlawful activities," Council of Europe investigator Dick Marty said.

"Other countries ignored them knowingly, or did not want to know," he said in the conclusions of the 65-page report released on the body's Web site.

While the report admits it has "no formal evidence" of secret CIA detention centers it said a number of states had clearly colluded with the system of CIA secret flights and secret transfers known as renditions.

Among the charges:-

* Poland and Romania ran secret detention centers

* Germany, Turkey, Spain, Cyprus and Azerbaijan were "staging points" for flights involving the unlawful transfer of detainees

* Ireland, Britain, Portugal, Greece and Italy were "stopovers" for flights involving the unlawful transfer of detainees

* Sweden, Bosnia, Britain, the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia, Germany and Turkey handed over suspects

* Cairo, Amman, Islamabad, Rabat, Kabul, Guantanamo Bay, Tashkent, Algiers and Baghdad served as detainee transfer/drop-off points

SLANDEROUS

Polish Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz said the report was false but many other governments have greeted the report with silence.

"These accusations are slanderous ... They are not based on any facts and that is all I know and all I have to say," Marcinkiewicz told reporters in parliament.

Despite the lack of "smoking gun" evidence, Marty said there were "a number of coherent and converging elements (that) indicated that secret detention centers have indeed existed and unlawful inter-state transfers have taken place in Europe."

Flight data provided in January and February from Eurocontrol helped uncover the web of flights, detention centers and stop-off points used in the U.S.-devised system.

Marty said 10 cases involving 17 individuals had come to light but many of the Council of Europe's 46 member states had been reluctant to provide information. More cases could follow.

EU investigators said last month they believed 30 to 50 people had been handed over to countries where they might face torture by the United States since the September 11, 2001, attacks.

While the suspects' treatment "does not appear to reach the threshold for torture, it may well be considered as inhuman or degrading," Marty's report added.

The pan-European rights body can name and shame countries but cannot launch legal proceedings.

The allegations of CIA abuses, first made by newspapers and human rights groups late last year, fanned concerns in Europe about U.S. anti-terror tactics. But European governments are now under scrutiny due to mounting evidence they at best turned a blind eye to illegal activities.

Washington insists it acted with the full knowledge of the governments concerned, acknowledges the secret transfer of some terrorist suspects between countries and denies any wrongdoing.

Swiss Sen. Dick Marty's final report, however, offered no clear, direct proof that CIA detention centers were set up in Europe - an allegation made by a human rights group last year.

Marty said Romania was part of what he called a "renditions circuit" and was used as a stopover by CIA-linked planes carrying terror suspects. He also said an airport in Poland was likely used as a detainee drop-off point, and accused a total of 14 European countries, including Britain, Italy and Germany, of violating human rights in connection with CIA activities.

"We believe we are in a position to state that successive CIA rendition operations have taken place in the course of the same, single flight circuit," Marty said in a report commissioned by the Council of Europe, the continent's leading human rights watchdog.

The report is addressed to the 46 Council of Europe member states and will likely be used by the group to put pressure on the countries implicated in it to investigate the allegations.

The report relied mostly on flight logs provided by the
European Union's air traffic agency, Eurocontrol, witness statements gathered from people who said they had been abducted by U.S. intelligence agents, and judicial and parliamentary inquiries in various countries.

In his report, Marty put airports in Timisoara, Romania, and Szymany, Poland, in a "detainee transfer/drop-off point" category, together with eight airports outside Europe.

Marty analyzed a flight pattern of a plane with tail number N313P. He said the plane arrived in Timisoara from Kabul,
Afghanistan, on the night of Jan. 25, 2004, after having transported Khaled El-Masri, a German who said he had been abducted by foreign intelligence agents in Macedonia, to the Afghan capital. El-Masri claims he was imprisoned for five months and tortured there.

Marty said the plane with the crew that accompanied El-Masri stayed in Timisoara for 72 minutes before leaving for Palma de Mallorca in the Mediterranean Sea.

"Having eliminated other explanations - including that of a simple logistics flight - the most likely hypothesis of the purpose of this flight was to transport one or several detainees from Kabul to Romania," Marty said in the report without elaborating.

Marty said that based on the information at his disposal, he deduced the Szymany airport in northeastern Poland was used for a rendition flight in September 2003.

Neither country offered immediate comment, but both have denied involvement in the past.

Marty's investigation runs parallel to one by the European Parliament, which has said that data from Eurocontrol shows there have been more than 1,000 clandestine CIA flights stopping on European territory since the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States.

But officials said the data does not make clear if there were detainees were on board the flights, nor does it shed any light on allegations of CIA secret prisons.

Allegations that CIA agents shipped prisoners through European airports to secret detention centers, including compounds in Eastern Europe, were first reported in November by The Washington Post. Human Rights Watch later identified air bases in Poland and Romania as possible locations of the alleged secret prisons, but both countries have denied involvement.

Clandestine prisons and secret flights via Europe to countries where suspects could face torture would breach the continent's human rights treaties, including the European Convention on Human Rights. The Council of Europe, the guardian of the treaty, has no power to punish countries for breaching it, other than terminating their membership in the organization.

The European Union could theoretically suspend the voting rights of a country found to have breached the convention, however the evidence would likely have to be proved in court.

In his report, Marty said that most European government "did not seem particularly eager to establish the alleged facts."

Together, aides and members of the House and Senate filed 23,000 public disclosure forms on their individual trips, the survey found, for an estimated price tag of about $50 million. Among the most popular destinations were Paris (at least 200 times), Hawaii (150) and Italy (140).

Congressional travel paid for by outside organizations like trade groups and corporations has been under intense scrutiny following scandals involving the lobbyist Jack Abramoff. While much attention has been focused on elected officials and corporate jet travel with lobbyists, the new study, conducted by the Center for Public Integrity, Medill News Service of Northwestern University and American Public Media programs, is the most extensive in recent years because it tallied the costs, purpose and destinations of trips by Congressional aides and politicians.

The study concluded that about 90 of the trips were paid for by lobbyists, which is an ethical violation, during the five and a half years examined. About 500 trips cost $10,000 or more each, and 16 cost $25,000 or more apiece, the study showed. About $20 million was spent on overseas travel.

Wendell Rawls, acting executive director of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan group that has conducted many investigations of money and politics over the years, said Monday that some trips could be considered legitimate for educational purposes. But he pointed out that the study found multiple ethics violations from members of both political parties, and that many trips were paid for by corporations that had business interests before Congress.

Mr. Rawls also questioned the amount of spending on some trips. For example, he said, former Representative Thomas Bliley, Republican of Virginia, and his wife went to London at a cost of $31,171 for four days in July 2000. Their air travel tickets were valued at $11,938.49 each, and were paid for by the Brown and Williamson tobacco company. The former congressman's public filings listed the purpose of the trip as meetings with officials from British American Tobacco and other trade officials.

"I would ask if every constituent for Representative Bliley had the same access as the people at Brown, Williamson," Mr. Rawls said of the former chairman of the House Commerce Committee. Mr. Bliley could not be reached for comment.

The study turned up other interesting educational travel and irregularities. Congressman Charles B. Rangel, Democrat of New York, has amended his forms for a trip in 2000 to Cuba, where he met with Fidel Castro. He first violated ethics rules by accepting travel expenses for his son and his wife, on a trip that was supposed to address the plight of endangered birds. But confronted with the center's findings, Mr. Rangel recently reimbursed and identified additional sponsors for his son's travel and for the trip; the sponsors included one of his longtime fund-raisers, John Catsimatidis of Gristede's Foods in New York, and the Cuban government. George A. Dalley, Mr. Rangel's chief of staff, said he erred in not knowing the reporting rules.

The study singled out General Atomics, a company based in San Diego that developed the Predator, the unmanned spy plane, because it spent more - $660,000 - on Congressional travel than any other corporation on lone-sponsor trips. The study noted that General Atomics seemed to favor trips for Congressional staff members and aides. Among those on trips to Turkey in 2004 or to Australia in 2005 were aides to Representative Randy Cunningham, a California Republican who has since been convicted of bribery and other crimes, and an aide to Senator Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who is minority leader.

The study said that some aides sat in on sales meetings that company officials held with foreign government officials, although the aides later told the survey's interviewers that they did not engage in sales pitches.

Gary Hopper, a vice president for General Atomics' Washington offices, said: "We wouldn't mix any kind of sales situation with Congressional staff there. I know that's a bone of contention with a lot of people out there but there was not in any way a quid pro quo."

Democrats, Republicans and lobbying associations all say that travel has slowed since the scandals over the Scotland golfing trips by Representative Tom DeLay received headlines last year and put a spotlight on Congressional travel.

Paul A. Miller, the president of the American League of Lobbyists, defended travel by lobbyists and elected officials. "Since the scandal, a lot of the travel has ceased to exist or members of Congress have been very diligent by what trips we go on," Mr. Miller said. "These trips are valuable experiences for members of Congress and their staffs. If the public doesn't pay for it and the private sector doesn't pay for it, the government isn't going to pick up the tab for it."

The House and Senate have passed legislation that would require additional disclosure for lobbying, but neither bill would place a permanent ban on privately sponsored travel. It is unclear what will emerge from a House-Senate conference committee.

The Center for Public Integrity was forced last year to withdraw a study it conducted on White House travel because of a flawed database that inflated the amount of money spent as well as the number of staff members. To avoid such errors this time, Mr. Rawls said the center pored over the 26,000 pages of travel documents individually, hired outside consultants to comb the data and the findings, and made conservative estimates of the data tallies.

As Mr. Libby's lawyers serve demand after demand for evidence that they hope will exculpate their client, special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald rallies back with briefs seeded with less-than-flattering assertions about Mr. Libby's bosses.

Responding to Mr. Libby's lawyers in a May 12 filing, for example, Mr. Fitzgerald included what many considered to be a shocking and revealing document: a copy of The New York Times Op-Ed column "What I Didn't Find in Africa," written by former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson and calling into question some of the Bush administration's claims regarding Iraq's nuclear-weapons program, annotated in Mr. Cheney's script with the question: "[D]id his wife send him on a junket?"

On Friday, Mr. Libby's lawyers filed a response with the court, saying their client hadn't seen the clipping until the F.B.I. showed him a copy-an argument that served to distance himself from the Vice President, if not exactly contradicting him.

But more importantly, this exhibit painted a picture of a Vice President angered by the column, and with clear knowledge of the relationship between Mr. Wilson, his wife and the circumstances of his trip to Niger.

This is the second time that Mr. Libby's lawyers have been slapped in the face with information that they themselves requested to aid in his defense.

In a letter in January, and then in a filing with more detail last month, Mr. Fitzgerald reported that the President allowed Mr. Cheney to authorize selective leaking of a classified National Intelligence Estimate report to counter administration critics on Iraq. The leak prompted outrage from Democrats, who saw a contradiction in Mr. Bush's insistence that leaks were indefensible, and led Representative Jane Harman to crown him the "leaker-in-chief."

"In defending himself, he's already had to reveal the degree to which the Vice President, the President and others have approved and/or directed the leaking of what might be classified information," said a defense lawyer who has handled government clients. It's "exposed the inner workings of what they may have preferred to keep private. His defense keeps the spotlight on the workings of the White House, which have proved to be sometimes embarrassing."

As in many discovery processes, the prosecutor wants to minimize the amount of material provided to the defense, and the defense wants to maximize their haul.

"Fitzgerald puts this stuff out to raise the cost to Libby, because he knows Libby doesn't want this stuff out there," suggested one lawyer familiar with the investigation. "Every time Libby punishes him on discovery, he'll punish the guy that Libby lied to protect .... There's certainly tension, and [Fitzgerald] obviously perceives that pushing on this stuff is going to cause [Libby] a great deal of pain."

Others rejected that theory. "Fitzgerald is the straightest-shooting prosecutor in the country. He's not playing any kind of game or retaliating. He's just showing the court what he needs," said a lawyer familiar with the case. A spokesman for Mr. Fitzgerald, Randall Samborn, declined to respond.

One former administration official downplayed the significance of Mr. Fitzgerald's findings.

"Would they rather not have had to deal with it? Sure. Did it flip everybody's views on Scooter? Probably not." And, in fact, many of the Republican faithful-including former Cheney advisor Mary Matalin-have joined the advisory committee of the Libby Legal Defense Trust in a show of support. Of course, many others have not.

"From the administration's view, the not-flattering stuff tends to be the not-flattering debates that already happened," said the official.

Mr. Libby discussed portions of the National Intelligence Estimate used to make the case for the Iraq war, and whose credibility has since been seriously undermined.

"Why you get defensive on it is that it highlights that subsequent events have proven that to be an inaccurate assessment," the official added.

In a key document request in March, the defense wrote: "The actions of government officials from the White House, the State Department and the CIA-and the documents they generated-are part and parcel of this story."

Telling that story is their job. Keeping that story under wraps is the White House's.

Mr. Libby's sprawling legal-defense team-which includes lawyers from Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in New York; Baker Botts in Washington, D.C.; Jones Day in California; and Dechert in Philadelphia-declined to comment on how Mr. Libby's loyalty to the administration has shaped his defense strategy.

(Last month, D.C. District Court Judge Reggie Walton threatened to issue a gag order to lawyers in the case after reporters were informed of a filing in the case before it was filed with the court.)

Mr. Libby is accused of obstructing justice, making false statements and perjury coming out of his testimony in an investigation into the possibly illegal disclosure of a C.I.A. operative's identity. The charges are based on alleged contradictions between statements Mr. Libby made to the F.B.I. and a grand jury and his conversations with reporters in the summer of 2003.

Based on the court's filings and conversations with lawyers familiar with the case, Mr. Libby's team appears to be conducting a broad and vigorous defense.

Their basic claim is that Mr. Libby was so busy he lost track of whom he talked to, which helps to explain why he didn't remember where he had learned of Valerie Plame, the C.I.A. operative whose leaked identity is at the center of the present inquiry, nor whom he talked to about her.

So they've requested an avalanche of information that would seem to convey exactly what that was like-among them the President's daily intelligence briefings, as well as notes and drafts of stories from reporters. They've argued that Ms. Plame's C.I.A. affiliation was not a closely held secret, and questioned the authority of Mr. Fitzgerald to bring his charges.

Lawyers said that the goal seemed to be to offer enough diversions from the narrow questions of who originally told Mr. Libby that Ms. Plame was a C.I.A. operative, and what his state of mind was when he talked to F.B.I. agents and the grand jury before his indictment.

They described it as a typical defense strategy of providing a broad and sometimes confusing story in place of the prosecutor's focused and narrow one.

"I'm not hearing that the basic charges are false with the discussion that's been going on in the court papers," said a lawyer familiar with the case.

But if the facts of the case are not in question, Mr. Libby has nevertheless pleaded not guilty. So his defense must rest in the interpretation of those facts, and the environment in which these facts emerged.

The tension between a defendant and his or her employer-whether in the case of a C.E.O. and a company or a Congressional staffer and a Congressional office-always exists, argued Abbe Lowell, a prominent D.C. defense attorney. "What's uncommon is that it's one of the highest-ranking government officials' highest-ranking deputy," he said.

One obvious tactic for defendants is to argue that they were simply executing orders. Yet Mr. Libby's team is taking a more nuanced approach, trying to strike a balance between painting a portrait of Mr. Libby as charged with massive responsibilities in his role as Mr. Cheney's deputy, and not pointing the finger at his boss. In other words, a consistent defense that is still not embarrassing to the White House.

Lawyers said it was impossible to know whether there were lines of inquiry that the defense was not pursuing at the behest of Mr. Libby.

"There are some times people might go down and say, 'I'm not going to raise this, I'm not going to do this'-friendship, family, employers, it could be a whole host of facts that could enter into a decision," explained a lawyer with a small involvement in the case.

But some with experience in these types of fraught situations said that while clients will typically comply with their lawyers' suggestions, sometimes that resolution is hard-won.

"There is a real tension there, because you're doing your utmost to defend your client, who has extreme loyalty," said a Washington lawyer familiar with independent-counsel investigations. "It takes a lot of convincing with a client to let you do your job to complete the defense."

The lawyer added: "It's going to be very, very difficult to get Libby to point the finger to one or two above him-if that, in fact, occurred."

But in a move that seemed to favor Mr. Libby's White House associates, his lawyers seemed quite willing to finger the leaker. In a hearing held to debate subpoenas issued to reporters and media outlets, William Jeffress, one of Mr. Libby's lead attorneys, strongly hinted that at an alibi source for former New York Times reporter Judy Miller, and possibly for Robert Novak and Bob Woodward (two of the other journalists embroiled in the case) as well: someone "maybe [in the] State Department."

"Your honor, we respectfully would submit that we think the source for Mr. Novak and Mr. Woodward, who wasn't even in the White House-we think the fact that what he knew, which is certainly as much or more than Mr. Libby knew about Ms. Wilson, convinced him that there was nothing wrong with disclosing her name to a reporter. That she was not covert. She was not classified."

For observers, this raises questions about whether the defense strategy is designed to get Mr. Libby off, or to try to get gratitude from the administration.

"I just don't think that folks in the administration are saying that Libby should fall on his sword so as not to embarrass people," said a lawyer familiar with the investigation. "He crossed that bridge when he decided to defend the case."

The council relied on flight logs provided by the European Union's air traffic agency, Eurocontrol, as well as evidence from sources inside intelligence services.

"Even if proof, in the classical meaning of the term, is not as yet available, a number of coherent and converging elements indicate that such secret detention centres did indeed exist in Europe," Marty said.

"It is now clear ... that authorities in several European countries actively participated with the CIA in these unlawful activities. Other countries ignored them knowingly, or did not want to know."

He listed seven member states that could be held responsible, in varying degrees, for violations of the rights of specific individuals: Sweden, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the United Kingdom, Italy, Macedonia, Germany and Turkey.

Several more colluded, actively or passively, in the detention or transfer of unknown persons, Marty said.

Secret flights and prisons where suspects could face torture would violate European human rights conventions.

The inquiry of the Council of Europe was launched last November after the allegations of rendition flights and air bases in Romania and Poland were brought to light by the Washington Post, Human Rights Watch and ABC News. The full report is due to be debated by the council's assembly on June 27.

The European Parliament is also investigating flight data of more than 1,000 clandestine CIA flights stopping at European destinations since the attacks in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.

There are calls to arms, even step-by-step instructions, from how to make an explosive to where a suicide bomber should stand in a crowded bus for maximum impact.

The recruits seem to be mostly young men at a crossroads between Islamic society and the Western world. Security experts call them the "jihad generation," young, confused and computer savvy.

"It is easier to recruit a 17-year-old who is in a crisis of identity, who is unsure of his place in the world, than it is to recruit someone who is 40, married, a job, a career, a lot of life experience to keep him balanced," said John Thompson of the Mackenzie Institute.

Using the internet in such a manner has been done before.

Ahmed Omar Abu Ali of Falls Church, Va., was found guilty of plotting to kill U.S. President George W. Bush and sentenced to 30 years in prison. Authorities found he had researched online terrorist manuals.

A report into the London's transit system bombings last July also found the bombers plotted their attack on the internet.

But Frank Cilluffo, who served in the U.S. Office of Homeland Security, says the street runs both ways.

"Hopefully, one of the outcomes of this case is that not only do terrorists recognize the role of the internet, but maybe they should also start recognizing that the good guys exploit that as well, and beware."

The Eichmann papers are among 27,000 newly declassified pages released by the CIA to the National Archives under Congressional pressure to make public files about former officials of Hitler's regime later used as American agents. The material reinforces the view that most former Nazis gave American intelligence little of value and in some cases proved to be damaging double agents for the Soviet KGB, according to historians and members of the government panel that has worked to open the long-secret files.

Elizabeth Holtzman, a former congresswoman from New York and member of the panel, the Interagency Working Group on records concerning Nazi and Japanese war crimes, said at a press briefing at the National Archives today that the documents show the CIA "failed to lift a finger" to hunt Eichmann and "forced us to confront not only the moral harm but the practical harm" of relying on intelligence from ex-Nazis.

She said information from the former Nazis was often tainted both by their "personal agendas" and their vulnerability to blackmail. "Using bad people can have very bad consequences," Ms. Holtzman said. She and other group members suggested that the findings should be a cautionary tale for intelligence agencies today.

As head of the Gestapo's Jewish affairs office during the war, Eichmann implemented the policy of extermination of European Jewry, promoting the use of gas chambers and having a hand in the murder of millions of Jews. Captured by the United States Army at the end of the war, he gave a false name and went unrecognized, hiding in Germany and Italy before fleeing to Argentina in 1950.

Israeli agents hunting for Eichmann came to suspect in the 1950's that he was in Argentina but they did not know his alias. They temporarily abandoned their search at about the time, in March 1958, that West German intelligence told the CIA that Eichmann had been living in Argentina as "Clemens," said Mr. Naftali, who is now at the University of Virginia but will become director of the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library in October.

The United States government, preoccupied with the cold war, had no policy at the time of pursuing Nazi war criminals. The West German government was wary of exposing Eichmann because officials feared what he might reveal about such figures as Hans Globke, a former Nazi then serving as a key national security adviser to Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, Mr. Naftali said.

In 1960, also at the request of West Germany, the CIA persuaded Life magazine, which had purchased Eichmann's memoir from his family, to delete a reference to Globke before publication, the documents show.

Since Congress passed the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act in 1998, the Interagency Working Group has persuaded the government to declassify more than 8 million pages of documents. But the group ran into resistance starting in 2002 from the CIA, which sought to withhold operational files from the 1940's and 50's.

After Congress extended the working group's term to 2007, and after the intervention of Senator Mike DeWine, Republican of Ohio; Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California; and Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York, Porter J. Goss, who was the CIA director, ordered the release of the records with very few deletions.

Stanley Moskowitz, a CIA official who assisted the working group for the last year, said the delicate question of releasing operational files has long been a "nettlesome problem" but that "the passage of time has shifted the balance" toward release. He said the new CIA director, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, has agreed to continue releasing the records.

Norman J.W. Goda, an Ohio University historian who reviewed the CIA material, said it showed in greater detail than previously known how the KGB aggressively targeted former Nazi intelligence officers for recruitment after the war. In particular, he said, the documents fill in the story of the "catastrophic" Soviet penetration of the Gehlen Organization, the post-war West German intelligence service sponsored by the United States Army and then the CIA.

Mr. Goda described the case of Heinz Felfe, a former SS officer who was bitter over the Allied firebombing of his native city, Dresden, and secretly worked for the KGB Felfe rose in the Gehlen Organization to oversee counterintelligence - placing a Soviet agent in charge of combating Soviet espionage in West Germany.

The CIA shared much sensitive information with Felfe, who visited the agency in 1956 to lobby for West German involvement in CIA operations, Mr. Goda found. A newly released 1963 CIA damage assessment, written after Felfe was arrested as a Soviet agent in 1961, found that he had exposed "over 100 CIA staffers" and seen that many eavesdropping operations ended with "complete failure or a worthless product."

The documents show that the CIA ignored "clear evidence of a war crimes record" in recruiting another former SS officer, Tscherim Soobzokov, said another historian at the briefing, Richard Breitman of American University. Because it valued Soobzokov for his language skills and ties to fellow ethnic Circassians living in the Soviet Caucasus region, the CIA deliberately hid his Nazi record from the Immigration and Naturalization Service after he moved to the United States in 1955, Mr. Breitman said.

But Soobzokov would not ultimately escape his past. He died in 1985 of injuries suffered three weeks earlier when a pipe bomb exploded outside his house in Paterson, NJ. The murder case has never been solved.

Batasar said he was given an eight-page synopsis of the allegations, including storming Parliament, blowing up some of the buildings and taking politicians hostage to demand the withdrawal of Canadian troops in Afghanistan. If the demands were not met, it is alleged, Chand wanted to behead Stephen Harper.

The 12 adults and five youths were arrested in southern Ontario as part of the largest operation carried out under Canada's Anti-terrorism Act. It involved as many as 400 police officers and security officials.

Local media have reported the suspects are accused of plotting terrorist attacks in different cities in southern Ontario. The targets included political and economic symbols including the Parliament Buildings and Peace Tower in capital Ottawa, along with the CN Tower and Toronto Stock Exchange in Toronto.

The 15 people, with another two already in prison on other crime charges, appeared at the court Tuesday amid tight security for the second time after their first court appearance on Saturday. The bail hearing could take several days, lawyers said.

The 12 adult suspects have been charged with knowingly participating, directly or indirectly, in the activity of a terrorist group. Six of them were also charged with planning to cause a deadly explosion, which could result in life prison if convicted.

Three of the suspects have been charged with importing firearms and prohibited ammunition, and supplying prohibited weapons.

Ten of the men are charged with engaging in terrorism-related training.

Diskin was quoted as elaborating at the meeting that since the Israeli army left Gaza in September 2005, there were 11 tons of TNT, three million bullets, 19,600 rifles, 1,600 pistols, 65 RPG launchers, 430 RPGs and some 10 shoulder rocket launchers smuggled into Israel.

Diskin believed that Qassam rockets fired against Israel from the Gaza Strip would continue, according to the report.

Last September, Israel withdrew from 21 settlements in the Gaza Strip and four in the West Bank under the leadership of former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

The first of the domestic incidents, all of which drew little attention at the time, began with the holdup of a string of Torrance, Calif. gas stations last summer. Muslim converts who bonded together in prison planned to use the robberies to finance attacks on 20 Army recruiting stations.

Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton admits they stumbled on the plot during a search.

"Make no mistake about it," Bratton said. "We dodged a bullet here - perhaps many bullets."

Police in Toledo, Ohio, busted another cell in February. This one consisted of three men training to attack U.S. forces overseas. Once again, luck played a role. When they tried to enlist someone in their mosque to help, he turned them in.

"These individuals are often hiding in plain sight in cities like Torrance and now Toledo," says John Pistole, a FBI deputy director.

Two months ago, a pair of Atlanta men, one a Georgia Tech engineering student, were arrested not long after communicating by e-mail with two of the suspects arrested in Canada over the weekend. The Atlanta men are charged with videotaping domestic targets, including the U.S. Capitol and the World Bank.

Analysts now conclude similarities between all the cases were dramatic: All were self-financed, self-motivated, and in each case the men were seeking out others to join their cell.

In short, Osama bin Laden didn't pay for these plots, recruit for them or even know of them. They were all totally homegrown - even amateurish. But if four, including the one in Canada, have been uncovered in just 11 months, officials fear there are inevitably other plots that have not been and are maturing even now.

The next attack here, officials predict, will bear no resemblance to Sept. 11. The casualty toll will not be that high, the target probably not that big. We may not even recognize it for what it is at first, they say. But it's coming - of that they seem certain.

©MMVI, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.

He also called for "truthful answers" from the Bush administration.

"If these things are born out, this process is really damaging to any attempt to combat terrorism in our society," he said. "It leads to the suspicion that what we are doing is the wrong tactic and even as bad as the terrorists themselves."

Mr Lloyd, a foreign office minister between 1997-99, told the BBC's Today programme that the word "rendition" was a euphemism for "kidnapping" and as such would be illegal under British law.

He said it had to be established whether the British government had taken part in an illegal activity under domestic law, and whether the Bush administration had "abused agreements" over the use of British airspace and airports.

"But the real issue is that this is massively damaging to the battle against terrorism," he added.

During prime minister's questions, Tony Blair was challenged by the Liberal Democrat leader, Sir Menzies Campbell, on whether the government had provided logistical support to the CIA flights.

"We have said absolutely everything we have to say on this," Mr Blair replied. "There is no more to add to that. The report adds absolutely nothing to the information we already have. We have kept parliament informed."

The government has acknowledged there were four rendition requests in 1998, two of which were granted.

A Foreign Office spokesman said today that the department was still studying the report but that there did not appear "to be much new stuff".

He repeated the government's line that some flights did land on UK soil but that there was no evidence to suggest that they were being used for rendition purposes. He also said the UK government did not condone torture in "any way, shape or form".

William Hague, shadow foreign secretary, said: "It is very important that the war against terror is conducted within the rule of law. Otherwise those of us fighting terrorism lose our moral authority."

Mr Hague told Sky News he had warned the US administration on a recent trip to Washington about the dangers of clandestine tactics in the war on terror. He called for European governments to give "a convincing response" to the report.

Michael Moore, the Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman, demanded an independent inquiry into the CIA flights.

"This report exposes the myth that European governments had no knowledge of or involvement in rendition and secret detentions," he said.

"Ministers must answer specific allegations of British assistance, and explain why they have failed to ask hard questions of their American counterparts."

He said that parliamentary questions tabled by Lib Dem MPs on specific flights through the UK remained unanswered over two months on.

"This is wholly unacceptable and follows a pattern of evasion and obfuscation by the government," he said.

Claudio Cardone of Amnesty International said that "kidnapping" and transferring suspects to different countries in secret could not be justified.

"Intelligence is needed. Nobody wants to be blown up, but unless this is done on the basis of international principles of law ... then you have lost to the terrorists," he told Sky News.

The Polish prime minister, Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, denied the report's suggestion that the CIA flights stopped or dropped off prisoners in Poland.

"This is slander and it's not based on any facts," Mr Marcinkiewicz told reporters in Warsaw.

A spokesman for the Spanish foreign ministry denied it had taken part "actively or passively" in rendition flights. "The government does not have even the slightest information" about stopovers on the Balearic islands, El País website reported.

Allegations that CIA agents shipped prisoners through European airports to secret detention centres, including compounds in eastern Europe, were first reported in November by The Washington Post.

The humanitarian group Human Rights Watch later identified air bases in Poland and Romania as possible locations of alleged secret prisons.

The documents, among 27,000 pages of CIA records released by the National Archives here, indicate that the agency was told in 1958 by then West German intelligence that Eichmann was living under an alias in the Buenos Aires area. But the CIA did nothing, and Eichmann - the infamous organiser of the trains that carried Jews to the Nazi extermination camps - was eventually seized by Mossad agents in 1960, and flown back to Israel where he was tried and, in 1962, executed.

The CIA's inaction reflected the shift in US foreign policy goals almost as soon as the Second World War was over, from hunting down Nazi war criminals to enlisting help for the new priority of fighting Communism, as it threatened to engulf not only all of Germany, but parts of western Europe as well.

In the case of Eichmann, the documents show the CIA was desperate not to compromise Hans Globke, a former Nazi who stayed on in West Germany and helped organise anti-Communist initiatives there.

Eichmann was only one prominent former war criminal to benefit. In 1983, Washington admitted that US Army intelligence officers helped the Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie, the "Butcher of Lyons," flee to Bolivia and escape prosecution by France after the war. A government report at the time admitted that the officers "interfered with the lawful and proper administration of justice" by protecting him after he had been recruited as an anti-Communist spy.

Historians have chronicled how the US allowed in hundreds if not thousands of Nazi regime members and former Nazi collaborators from eastern European countries that fell under Soviet domination. "We knew what we were doing," one senior CIA officer was quoted as saying in a 1989 book."Any bastard as long as he was anti-Communist."

After Eichmann was captured, the CIA pressed US publications to keep quiet about his connection with Globke. Life magazine, which had bought Eichmann's memoirs, dropped a mention of Globke "at our request," according to a memorandum from the then CIA director, Allen Dulles.