Twelve Nobel Peace Prize laureates are urging President Barack Obama to disclose the CIA's use of torture on terror suspects since the attacks of September 11, 2001.
The potential release of a long-delayed Senate report about this "dark period" of American history has brought the country to a "crossroads", the Nobel laureates wrote in an open letter to Obama posted on the website TheCommunity.com.
Obama, who won a Peace Prize himself in 2009, recognised in very direct terms in August that the United States had engaged in torture.
"We tortured some folks," he said at the time.
But the White House is engaged in tough negotiations with politicians over how much of the report on CIA torture should be declassified, with the intelligence agency insisting that agents' pseudonyms be blacked out.
"The open admission by the president of the United States that the country engaged in torture is a first step in the US coming to terms with a grim chapter in its history," the Nobel laureates wrote in their letter to Obama.
The laureates noted that many among them had see the effects of torture in their own countries, or were themselves "torture survivors".
After the 2001 attacks, the CIA rounded up dozens of people suspected of having ties to al-Qaeda and used so-called enhanced interrogation techniques on them, including sleep deprivation, simulated drowning (waterboarding) or shackling detainees in painful "stress" positions for long periods of time while naked.
The letter's signatories were: Oscar Arias, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1987, Mohamed ElBaradei (2005), Carlos Belo (1996), Leymah Gbowee (2011), John Hume (1998), F W De Klerk (1993), Adolfo Perez Esquivel (1980), Jose Ramos-Horta (1996), Desmond Tutu (1984), Muhammad Yunus (2006), Betty Williams (1976) and Jody Williams (1997).
