By Sky News US Team
The CIA's spymaster has disavowed abusive techniques used by his agency in interrogating suspects after 9/11, while staunchly defending his officers.
During a rare news conference at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, John Brennan said: "In a limited number of cases, agency officers used interrogation techniques that had not been authorised, were abhorrent and rightly should be repudiated by all.
"And we fell short when it came to holding some officers accountable for their mistakes."
But he said the "overwhelming majority" of his interrogators acted appropriately and "did what they were asked to do in the service of our nation".
Mr Brennan was addressing a Senate report that detailed the US intelligence agency's "brutal" treatment of al Qaeda suspects in a network of secret prisons around the world.
He told Thursday's news conference the programme was ordered at a time when the US feared more terrorist attacks.
"There were no easy answers," he said.
"And whatever your views are on EITs (enhanced interrogation techniques)… the agency did a lot of things right during this difficult time to keep this country safe and secure."
Sky News' Dominic Waghorn in Washington says the spymaster chose his words carefully, but they will sound mealy-mouthed and disingenuous to CIA critics.
For instance, Mr Brennan said it was "unknowable" whether EITs managed to extract useful intelligence from terrorism suspects.
But he also said the interrogations did help locate Osama bin Laden, while arguing it was unclear if such intelligence could have been gleaned without such methods.
Mr Brennan said that as far as he was aware only three detainees were waterboarded, though the Senate report asserted the number could have been higher.
As he spoke, Senator Dianne Feinstein went online to issue a point-by-point rebuttal of his arguments.
"No evidence that terror attacks were stopped, terrorists captured or lives saved through use of EITs. #ReadTheReport," she tweeted.
Under the programme, detainees were beaten, repeatedly waterboarded and subjected to medically unnecessary "rectal feeding" and "rectal rehydration". One detainee froze to death.
President Barack Obama, who halted his predecessor George W Bush's programme when he came to office, has said the practices were contrary to US values.
But Mr Bush's Vice President Dick Cheney robustly defended the programme on Wednesday night.
"The report's full of crap," he told Fox News, while conceding he had not read it.
The Senate intelligence committee concluded in Tuesday's report that the CIA deliberately misled Congress and the White House about the value of the information its interrogators were gathering.
China and Iran, whose own human rights records have often been criticised by Washington, denounced the abuses, but so did some close US friends like Germany.
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