Russia has called a damning US report on the torture of detainees "shocking" and urged global pressure to force Washington to release still-classified details on rights violations.
Russia, which has always bristled at what it sees as Washington's incessant attempts to lecture Moscow on human rights, seized on the latest opportunity to say the Kremlin's former Cold War foe and its allies were no models of democracy.
A searing US Senate Intelligence Committee report released Tuesday said the CIA's interrogation of al-Qaeda suspects was far more brutal than acknowledged and did not produce useful intelligence.
"Its contents are shocking," the Russian foreign ministry's human rights envoy Konstantin Dolgov said, referring to the report.
"The published data is the latest proof of crude systemic violations of human rights by US authorities," he said in a statement.
"Such a state of affairs does not mesh with the United States' claims to the title of a 'paragon of democracy," Dolgov said. "This is far from the reality."
Dolgov also called for a probe into the role of other governments that allowed the CIA to run secret prisons on their territory.
The call appeared to be a thinly veiled jab at countries such as Poland whose former president Aleksander Kwasniewski acknowledged for the first time on Wednesday that his country hosted a secret US jail.
Since the outbreak of the confrontation between Russia and the West over Ukraine, Poland has been one of the Kremlin's most vocal critics.
The US report said detainees were beaten, waterboarded -- some of them dozens of times -- and humiliated through the painful use of medically unnecessary "rectal feeding" and "rectal rehydration."
Detainees were also kept awake for up to 180 hours, given ice water baths and stripped naked, the Russian foreign ministry pointed out, adding that some of the detainees were "innocent."
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