President George W Bush spared a few minutes for a grip-and-grin in the Oval Office with the visiting president of Latvia, but behind the scenes in the White House there was turmoil following a week of setbacks for his war plan.

Hans Blix, the United Nations weapons inspector, had told the security council that his teams had found no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, pulling the rug from under Bush’s strategy. France, Germany and Russia jointly declared that “nothing today justifies war”.

Bush’s ally, Tony Blair, was under attack at home: the dispatch of tanks and troops to Heathrow airport to guard against a suspected Al-Qaeda attack had paradoxically reinforced anti-war sentiment.

After a weekend of peace demonstrations in Europe, including 1m on the streets of London, Blair was now flying to an emergency Brussels summit to try to convince his sceptical European Union allies to support a crucial second UN resolution that would legitimise an invasion. To top it all, Osama Bin Laden issued yet another tape describing Bush as “stupid”.

From the northern Italian city of Milan, however, came more encouraging news: a team of CIA agents had seized a suspected Al-Qaeda recruiter whom they had been following for months. He was being spirited away to Egypt for questioning without the normal legal delays of extradition. Egyptian interrogators had a track record for getting prisoners to talk. Hadn’t they extracted detailed evidence of a link between Al-Qaeda and Iraq from a suspect previously handed over by the Americans?

Nearly three years later, even that good news has turned sour. The secret policy of “extraordinary rendition” — the kidnapping on the streets of foreign cities of suspects who are handed over to third-party security agents for harsh interrogation — has run headlong into a high-stakes political row in the United States over the place of torture in the war on terror.

This has unleashed a rash of rendition revelations in the American press that has sent transatlantic relations plummeting again. Already dismayed by evidence of American maltreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, Europeans are reacting with outrage at reports that the practice of putting suspected terrorists, in Bush’s words, “out of harm’s way” is much more common than previously believed — and that it has been happening in Europe.

The rendition programme, many argue, violates a key provision
of the international convention against torture, endorsed by Bush. This is more than a moral issue. Human rights organisations say that British and other European authorities could be liable to prosecution as accomplices to torture if, as has been reported, the CIA flew its suspects through their airports en route to north African jails or secret interrogation centres in eastern Europe.

There have been hundreds of flights by CIA aircraft through European airports since September 11, 2001. Although intelligence experts say that most would have been on routine agency business, all are now under scrutiny.

Demands for clarification forced Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, onto the defensive as she toured Europe last week. She came under heavy pressure from European legislators, pressure groups and the media. How many people had been subject to extraordinary rendition? How many of them were tortured and where? How much did the United States tell allied governments such as Britain? There were no answers beyond an assurance from Rice that US personnel were prohibited from the “cruel, inhumane and degrading” treatment of detainees.

What has been going on? Until the full picture emerges in the United States, the evidence will come from six judicial investigations that are under way into alleged rendition cases across Europe. The most significant is in Milan, where judges are seeking the extradition from America of 22 alleged CIA operatives accused of premeditated kidnap. The charges carry a maximum of 10 years and eight months in jail.

The 230-page Milan arrest warrant, obtained by The Sunday Times, offers a unique insight into extraordinary rendition. It is a tale of patient planning and surveillance punctuated by high spending and romance in luxury hotels and a reckless disregard for secrecy. According to one Milan investigator, “the squad was arrogant . . . They thought they could do whatever they wanted”.