Important for those tracking relationships between the executive and legislative branches, the committee’s report makes the case that Congress, the White House and the public were misled by the CIA. While the leadership of the Intelligence Committee had been briefed as far back as September 2002, months after the transfer of Abu Zubaydah into CIA custody, the full committee wasn’t briefed until Sept. 6, 2006, the very same day that Bush first made the operations public.

CIA documents reviewed by the committee showed the agency said it planned to cremate Zubaydah if he didn’t survive harsh interrogations. At times, he was confined to small boxes, including one resembling a coffin.

“Briefings to the full committee contained numerous inaccuracies, including inaccurate descriptions of how interrogation techniques were applied and what information was produced from the program,” the committee’s majority said in a release.

The report suggests that the CIA also provided inaccurate information to the Department of Justice about how the interrogation program was viewed on Capitol Hill. The committee found that the CIA told the Office of Legal Counsel that there were no objections from senators looped in on the program, even though several senators, including Feinstein, had written letters to that effect, and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., had expressed the view that some practices constituted torture.

The panel’s report, the result of a years-long review of more than 6.3 million pages of documents including transcripts of interviews conducted by the CIA inspector general and the agency’s own history project, also points to questions by the Bush White House that did not receive complete or accurate responses from the intelligence world.

An internal CIA review “identified numerous inaccuracies in the CIA’s effectiveness representations,” the committee said in its statement.

In a statement, CIA Director John O. Brennan disputed several elements of the report, including the findings about inaccurate or misleading information provided to Congress.

“We also disagree with the Study’s characterization of how CIA briefed the program to the Congress, various entities within the Executive Branch, and the public. While we made mistakes, the record does not support the Study’s inference that the Agency systematically and intentionally misled each of these audiences on the effectiveness of the program. Moreover, the process undertaken by the Committee when investigating the program provided an incomplete and selective picture of what occurred,” Brennan said. “As noted in the Minority views and in a number of additional views of Members, no interviews were conducted of any CIA officers involved in the program, which would have provided members with valuable context and perspective surrounding these events.”