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Rome prepares for visit by Bush

Thousands of police were deploying yesterday morning in downtown Rome ahead of US President George W. Bush's meetings with the pope and Italian officials.

Dozens of trucks and buses surrounded the Colosseum, the downtown Piazza Venezia and other historic venues as scores of officers, some in anti-riot gear, poured from the vehicles.

The main boulevard leading to St. Peter's Square and the Vatican was closed to traffic, with police and helicopters guarding the area.

Bush arrived on Friday following the G8 summit in Germany and a brief stop in Poland, just hours after a trial opened in Milan over the kidnapping of a terror suspect in the much-criticized US "extraordinary rendition" program.

His visit also coincides with the release of an explosive report detailing secret CIA prisons in Europe.

Bush will face two separate demonstrations as the far left of Italy's ruling center-left coalition seeks to distance itself from more hardline anti-US campaigners.

The government's two communist parties and the Greens have opted for a rally and pop concert in the Piazza del Popolo in the center of the Italian capital while the more radical activists plan a march.

Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi has asked government members of the Refoundation Communist and Italian Communist parties to stay away from the rally, while party leaders and lawmakers plan to attend.

The event will point up divisions within the government, which ranges from communists, pacifists and Greens on the left to centrist Catholics.

Organizers hope the other, more hardline, protest to be staged by anti-globalization and far-left activists will attract as many as 200,000 people.

However several leftist peace groups plan to attend the Piazza del Popolo event.

The Milan court on Friday began trying in absentia 25 CIA agents accused of kidnapping Milan imam Osama Mustafa Hassan -- better known as Abu Omar -- and transferring him to a high-security prison outside Cairo, where he claims he was tortured.

Also on Friday, Council of Europe investigator Dick Marty released a report in Strasbourg, France, saying the CIA ran secret prisons in Poland and Romania from 2003 to 2005 to interrogate terror suspects under a program that was authorized by the countries' presidents.

The European Commission immediately called on EU countries accused of taking part in the covert CIA program to conduct impartial investigations "as quickly as possible" to establish responsibility.

Military issues are particularly thorny in Italy, such as Rome's tenuous commitment to its mission in Afghanistan and widespread domestic opposition to a plan to enlarge a US military base in northeastern Italy.

Prodi was briefly forced to step down three months ago after losing a foreign policy vote in the Senate, principally over the deployment of 2,000 Italian troops in Afghanistan, for lack of support from the far left of his ruling coalition.

Bush said in an interview with the daily La Stampa that he wanted to speak to Prodi about his "difficult choices" in Afghanistan.

"I want to let him know how important the Italian commitment is in Afghanistan, now and in the future," Bush said.

The Iraq war has also produced strains over the killing of Italian secret service's No. 2 man Nicola Calipari, whom an US marine shot dead in March 2005 on Baghdad's airport road.
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