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France and Pakistan agreed to cooperate in the field of civilian nuclear energy during Mr Zardari's visit to Paris earlier this month, but details of the plan have yet to be agreed.

Thousands of US soldiers pass through the Manas base every month on their way in and out of Afghanistan.

It is also home to the large tanker aircraft that are used for in-air refuelling of fighter planes on combat missions, and it serves as a key supply hub.

For Russia, on the other hand, its closure would be a diplomatic victory as it seeks to reassert its influence in former Soviet republics, analysts say.

"I think that the Russians are trying to have it both ways with respect to Afghanistan in terms of Manas," US defence secretary Robert Gates said on Thursday, on his way to Krakow to meet his Polish counterpart.

"On one hand you're making positive noises about working with us in Afghanistan and on the other hand you're working against us in terms of that airfield which is clearly important to us."

On Tuesday, the US commander for the Middle East and Central Asia, General David Petraeus, held talks in Uzbekistan, which has rail links with Afghanistan. The US has already reached deals with Russia and Kazakhstan to send non-military cargo to Afghanistan using their rail networks, but the supplies would have to go through Uzbekistan. The US used to have an air base in Uzbekistan that served troops operating in Afghanistan. But Uzbek authorities closed it in 2005 after criticism from the US and EU over a crackdown on a mass protest in the town of Andijan.

During Sunday's program, Chavez said his government may expand a military base on the Caribbean island of La Orchila, approximately 110 miles (180 kilometers) off the South American country's central coast.

La Orchila is already home to a small military base, including helicopter landing pads and docks, as well as a presidential residence.

Similar conclusions were reached by the second investigative report on CIA kidnappings in Europe, which was submitted two years ago by the special investigator of the Council of Europe, Dick Marty

Journalist Mariusz Kowalewski at Rzeczpospolita and two colleagues have been searching for months now for proof of the existence of a secret CIA base in Poland. The journalists have discovered flight record books from Szymany that had been declared lost, and based on refueling receipts and currency exchange rates, they have reconstructed flights and routes, and spoken with informants. Over the past few weeks, their newspaper and the television network TVP Info have revealed new details on an almost daily basis.

There are rumors circulating that one of the most important interrogators of Sheikh Mohammed, an American named Deuce Martinez -- the man who didn't torture him, but rather had the task of gently coaxing information out of him -- was in Poland at the time. That is the proof that's still missing.

According to Marty's report, members of the former Polish military intelligence and counterintelligence agency, WSI, were given positions with the border police, customs and airport administration to safeguard the activities of the CIA. "The latest revelations in Poland fully corroborate my evidence, which is based on testimony by insiders and documents that have been leaked to me," says the investigator today. Now, under the "dynamic force of the truth" that Obama has unleashed, Marty says that Europeans must finally reveal "which governments tolerated and supported the illegal practices of the CIA."

"The order to give the CIA everything they needed came from the very top, from the president," a member of the Polish military intelligence agency told the Marty team in 2007. Kwasniewski denies this. He says that there was close intelligence corporation with the US, but no prisons on Polish soil.

It's very possible that the debate on torture and responsibility which is currently being conducted in the US will soon also reach Europe. After all, Germany granted the US flyover rights and dropped its bid to extradite 13 CIA operatives in the case of Khalid el-Masri, a German citizen who claims he was abducted by the Americans. The Italian intelligence agency allegedly assisted the CIA with the kidnapping in Milan of the Islamic cleric Abu Omar. Britain's intelligence agency, MI6, reportedly delivered information directly to CIA agents who were conducting interrogations in Morocco. And there are also reports of a secret prison in Romania.

The US recently invested millions of dollars in a bridge connecting Tajikistan and Afghanistan, which will almost certainly be used to transport the supplies.

The US had previously announced it intended to transport supplies to Uzbekistan through Russia and Kazakhstan.

It comes after Kyrgyzstan accused the US of not paying enough to rent the air base at Manas, near the capital city of Bishkek.

The licence to close the base was signed into law this week by Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev. The Kyrgyz foreign ministry said on Friday that it had officially issued an eviction notice giving the US 180 days to vacate the area.

Analysts have suggested that Kyrgyzstan's leaders will not carry out their threat to evict the US, but are using the law as a bargaining chip to get more rent money from Washington. US Defence Secretary Robert Gates sought to play down the Kyrgyz spat on Thursday, saying the US was open to negotiation on the rent. "We are prepared to look at the fees and see if there is justification for a somewhat larger payment," he told a news conference.

The investigation was initiated by the Military Advocate General after reviewing claims made during a conference at the Rabin Military Preparation Center at which soldiers who participated in Operation Cast Lead were present.

The investigation concluded, based on evidence from the soldiers that participated in the conference, that the stories told were purposely exaggerated and hyperbolic in order to reinforce a point amongst the conference participants.

For example, one story made the claim that a soldier was allegedly given orders to fire at an elderly woman. However, upon investigation, it was found that the soldier witnessed no such thing, and was only repeating a rumor that he had heard from an unknown source.

No evidence to justify further legal procedures was discovered in this context. When the case did not offer sufficient evidence, it was decided that the case should be closed.”

This same soldier admitted that he had not witnessed the additional disrespectful and immoral incidents he had described during the conference and that they were based on rumors.

A claim made by a different soldier who had supposedly been ordered to open fire at a woman and two children was also determined to be an incident that he had not witnessed. After checking the claim, it was found that during this incident, a force had opened fire in a different direction—specifically, towards two suspicious men who were unrelated to the civilians in question.

During the aforementioned investigations, the participants at the Rabin Center explicitly stated that they had based their claims relating to the use of phosphorous munitions on what they had heard in the media and not on their own personal knowledge.

In an unrelated investigation, it was found that in a similar incident, a woman, suspected of being a suicide bomber, approached IDF forces. After trying to convince her to cease all movement and to stop advancing toward the forces, they then opened fire.

The Military Advocate General, Brig. Gen. Avichai Mendelblit, concluded the findings of the Military Police investigation: "It is unfortunate that none of the speakers at the conference was careful to be accurate in the depiction of his claims, and even more so that they chose to present various incidents of a severe nature, despite not personally witnessing and knowing much about them. It seems that it will be difficult to evaluate the damage done to the image and morals of the IDF and its soldiers, who had participated in Operation Cast Lead, in Israel and the world."

There are other examples, like Turkmenistan’s May signing of a gas exploration deal with a German company, and Armenia’s awarding of a major national honor to Moscow’s nemesis, President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia. But the biggest came last week when Kyrgyzstan — set to receive $2.15 billion in Russian aid — reversed a decision that had been seen as a coup for Moscow, last winter’s order terminating the American military’s use of the Manas Air Base there.

There are few projects that matter more to Russia than restoring its influence in the former Soviet republics, whose loss to many in Moscow is still as painful as a phantom limb. Competition over Georgia and Ukraine has brought relations between Moscow and Washington to a post-cold-war low, and the matter is bound to be central to the talks that begin on Monday between Russia’s president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, and President Obama.

Kyrgyzstan’s reversal on Manas is a case study in canny horse trading. Russian officials, including Mr. Medvedev, have said they blessed the decision, and that may be true, but President Kurmanbek S. Bakiyev is the one who walked away with what he wanted. Moscow wanted the base, a key transit hub for the United States’ war in Afghanistan, shut down; Kyrgyzstan wanted more money. In February, Moscow seemed to have achieved a master stroke — at a news conference announcing the pledge of $2.15 billion in Russian aid, Mr. Bakiyev said the United States would have to leave Manas in six months.

Russia’s ability to attract its neighbors to its side and keep them there is unimpressive. The Kremlin’s methods have been reactive and often bullying, combining incentives like cheap energy or cash disbursement with threats of trade sanctions and gas cutoffs.The war in Georgia seems to have hurt Moscow in that regard. Rather than being cowed into obedience, as most Western observers feared, the former republics seem to have grown even more protective of their sovereignty. Moreover, the leaders themselves have thrived by playing Russia and the West and, in some cases, China off against one another, although that has not brought stability or prosperity to their countries. In Moscow’s so-called zone of privileged interests, in other words, Russia is just another competitor.

The first Russian payments — a $150 million emergency grant and a $300 million low-interest loan — arrived in April, allowing Mr. Bakiyev to pay wages and pensions as he began his re-election campaign. Then Kyrgyzstan shocked the region by announcing a new agreement with the United States. Washington will pay more than triple the rent for the base — now called a “transit center” — increasing its annual payment to $60 million from $17.4 million, while kicking in upwards of $50 million in grants to the government. No one knows if the Kremlin will make good on the rest of its pledge.

Moldova, which has just received a Russian pledge of $500 million four weeks before voters go to the polls to elect a new Parliament.

Belarus’s president, Aleksandr Lukashenko, who is avidly pursuing Western partners, has been barraged with carrots and sticks from Moscow — first promised $2 billion in Russian aid, then bitterly chastised for his economic policy, then punished with a crippling ban on the import of milk products, then rewarded by a reversal of the import ban. Russia regards Mr. Lukashenko’s truculence as a bluff.

now he has started a review of policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan intended to find a new strategy, and he signaled that reconciliation could emerge as an important initiative, mirroring the strategy used by Gen. David H. Petraeus in Iraq.

“If you talk to General Petraeus, I think he would argue that part of the success in Iraq involved reaching out to people that we would consider to be Islamic fundamentalists, but who were willing to work with us because they had been completely alienated by the tactics of Al Qaeda in Iraq,” Mr. Obama said. At the same time, he acknowledged that outreach may not yield the same success. “The situation in Afghanistan is, if anything, more complex,” he said. “You have a less governed region, a history of fierce independence among tribes. Those tribes are multiple and sometimes operate at cross purposes, and so figuring all that out is going to be much more of a challenge.”

administration officials have criticized the Pakistani government for its own reconciliation deal with local Taliban leaders in the Swat Valley, where Islamic law has been imposed and radical figures hold sway. Pakistani officials have sought to reassure administration officials that their deal was not a surrender to the Taliban, but rather an attempt to drive a wedge between hard-core Taliban leaders and local Islamists.

During the interview, Mr. Obama also left open the option for American operatives to capture terrorism suspects abroad even without the cooperation of a country where they were found. “There could be situations — and I emphasize ‘could be’ because we haven’t made a determination yet — where, let’s say that we have a well-known Al Qaeda operative that doesn’t surface very often, appears in a third country with whom we don’t have an extradition relationship or would not be willing to prosecute, but we think is a very dangerous person,” he said.“I think we still have to think about how do we deal with that kind of scenario,”

The president went on to say that “we don’t torture” and that “we ultimately provide anybody that we’re detaining an opportunity through habeas corpus to answer to charges.”Aides later said Mr. Obama did not mean to suggest that everybody held by American forces would be granted habeas corpus or the right to challenge their detention. In a court filing last month, the Obama administration agreed with the Bush administration position that 600 prisoners in a cavernous prison on the American air base at Bagram in Afghanistan have no right to seek their release in court.

This decision came to light recently, after the Al Jazeera English network aired video of a group prayer service and chapel sermon that a reporter said suggested U.S. troops were being encouraged to spread Christianity.

"This was irresponsible and dangerous journalism sensationalizing year-old footage of a religious service for U.S. soldiers on a U.S. base and inferring that troops are evangelizing to Afghans," Col. Gregory Julian said.