A Senate report says the CIA lied to the White House and used "brutal" and "ineffective" torture techniques on al-Qaeda suspects in the years after the September 11 attacks.

After the fall of the World Trade Center in 2011, then-president George W Bush authorised America's spies to use a new set of methods to extract information from people they captured.

Those methods were formally known inside the US government as "enhanced interrogation techniques". But others used a different word: torture.

From 2002 onward, the CIA operated a network of secret "black site" prisons around the world, with bases ranging from Poland to Thailand.

These prisons were used to brutalise people that the CIA suspected had information that might lead them to Osama bin Laden or prevent the next attack on the United States.

Interrogators waterboarded their subjects, kept them in frozen rooms and beat them to try to make them talk.

Barack Obama was elected in 2008 on a promise to end the CIA's torture programme and upon taking office signed an order to promote "the safe, lawful and humane treatment" of American prisoners.

But Mr Obama's order was not the end of the story.
Democrats in the Senate pushed ahead with an exhaustive $40 million report into the torture programme, arguing that it was important for America to come to terms with what had been done.

The CIA has fought against releasing any of the report and has succeeded in redacting parts of it. Republicans, including Mr Bush, have stood by the programme, saying it helped prevent a second September 11.

However the report says the Senate committee found no evidence of counter-terrorism successes due to enhanced interrogation techniques.

It also states that the CIA used "brutal" and "ineffective" interrogation techniques and revealed that the CIA provided inaccurate information to the White House, Congress, the Justice Department, the CIA inspector general, the media, and the American public to gain approval for the use of torture.

US embassies and military forces around the world are braced for possible unrest in the Islamic world as the reports contents are made public.


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