A shamefaced United States skulked behind intense security measures yesterday as the Senate released the much-trailed report into CIA brutality to terror suspects.

Across the world, US embassies were on heightened alert, fearing a backlash.

While heavily redacted, the report was a damning indictment of the CIA terror programme during the administration of George W Bush.

President Barack Obama has sought to distance the US from past deeds and outlawed harsh interrogation techniques which he has denounced as “torture.”

But there is little Mr Obama will be able to do to reduce the impact of a gross catalogue of brutality.

The report covers the treatment of 119 terror suspects rounded up between 2001 and 2009.

Introducing the report, Senator Dianne Feinstein noted that 26 of them had been wrongly held and evidence against them not up to standard.

The suspects were subjected to waterboarding, extreme stress and other harsh methods, in a series of interrogations either at CIA-run secret prisons or the Guantanamo Bay US concentration camp on Cuba.

The countries in which these prisons were situated were redacted in the document but there were scores of them running at various times.

The report revealed that the CIA misled the White House about the details and success of the programme.

It showed that CIA methods were ineffective, the information gained inaccurate and unreliable, CIA management of the programme inadequate and flawed and the interrogation methods far more brutal than previously revealed.

Ms Feinstein sparred for months with the administration and CIA chiefs over proposed redactions, which have resulted in a 480-page summary of the 6,000-page investigation.

But former Bush vice-president Dick Cheney staunchly defended the interrogation programme, telling the New York Times that it had been “absolutely and totally justified.”

He denied that the CIA had withheld any information.

And, “as far as I’m concerned, they ought to be decorated, not criticised,” he said of the CIA interrogators.

Ms Feinstein said: “When we make mistakes we admit them … and we move on.”