The head of the Central Intelligence Agency has acknowledged some agency interrogators used "abhorrent" unauthorised techniques in questioning terrorism suspects after the 9/11 attacks.
CIA director John Brennan said on Thursday there was no way to determine whether the methods used produced useful intelligence, but he strongly denied the CIA misled the public.
"The agency failed to establish quickly the operational guidelines needed to govern the entire effort," he 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," he said.
Brennan said he believed that coercive interrogations had a "strong prospect" of producing false information.
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"I tend to believe that the use of coercive methods has a strong prospect for resulting in false information because if somebody is being subjected to a course of techniques, they may say something to have those techniques stopped," Brennan told a press conference.
