Paris ? Fourteen European nations colluded with U.S. intelligence in a “spider’s web” of human rights abuses to help the CIA spirit terror suspects to illegal detention facilities, a European investigator said Wednesday.

Swiss Sen. Dick Marty’s report to Europe’s top human rights body was thin on evidence but raises the possibility of a cover-up involving both friends and critics of Washington’s war on terror. It says European governments “did not seem particularly eager to establish” the facts.

The 67-page report, addressed to the 46 Council of Europe member states, will likely be used by the rights watchdog to pressure countries to investigate their suspected role in U.S. rendition flights carrying terror suspects.

Marty’s claims triggered a wave of angry denials but also accusations that governments are stonewalling attempts to confront Europe’s role in the flights.

“This report exposes the myth that European governments had no knowledge of, or involvement in, rendition and secret detentions,” said lawmaker Michael Moore, foreign affairs spokesman for Britain’s second opposition party, the Liberal Democrats.

In the strongest allegations so far, Marty said evidence suggests planes linked to the CIA carrying terror suspects stopped in Romania and Poland and likely dropped off detainees there.

Moreover, the report describes an intricate “rendition circuit” of international flights by suspected CIA planes among recurring airports that allegedly functioned with the knowledge of European governments involved.

Officials in Romania and Poland vigorously denied the accusations.

“This is slander and it’s not based on any facts,” Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, Poland’s prime minister, said in Warsaw.

But Filip Ilkowski, leader of Poland’s “Stop War” movement protesting the Iraq war, said the Polish government was trying to thwart European Union investigators. “It is hard to say whether prisoners were dropped off here, but from what we know, U.S. planes landed in Poland outside the official channels. The government has done nothing to clarify the matter; it is doing everything to cover it up,” he said.

White House press secretary Tony Snow stressed that the U.S. does not condone or practice torture, adding, “We will not agree to send anybody to a nation or place that practices torture.”

“International cooperation in the war on terror is essential for winning,” Snow said, “and rendition is not something that began with this nation, and it’s certainly going to be practiced in the future.” He also noted that “Carlos the Jackal, you may recall, by rendition ended up in a French jail.”