LANGLEY, Va. >> During an extraordinary televised news conference Thursday, CIA Director John Brennan conceded that detainees underwent "abhorrent" interrogation methods, and retreated from previous assertions that the techniques played a direct role in obtaining vital intelligence on terrorists.

But he refused to call the techniques torture and insisted the harsh treatment meted out to suspected terrorists in secret cells hidden across the world, as described in a Senate Intelligence Committee report made public Tuesday, should not besmirch the reputation of the hundreds of CIA employees who worked diligently to protect Americans.

"In a limited number of cases, agency officers used interrogation techniques that had not been authorized, were abhorrent and rightly should be repudiated by all, and we fell short when it came to holding some officers accountable for their mistakes," Brennan said. "It is vitally important to recognize, however, that the overwhelming majority of officers involved in the program at CIA carried out their responsibilities faithfully and in accordance with the legal and policy guidance they were provided."

CIA officials said they couldn’t recall a similar instance when a director of the notoriously secretive CIA appeared in a nationally televised news conference in which he responded to questions from reporters assembled at CIA headquarters in suburban Washington.

But the appearance underscored the extraordinary pressure the agency finds itself under after the release of the Senate report, which recounted in excruciating detail how the CIA supervised the use of waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other humiliating and abusive techniques on at least 39 of the 119 suspected terrorists who had been kept in secret captivity.

In his presentation, Brennan acknowledged the accuracy of many of the Senate report’s findings, even as he sought to justify them as an understandable response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. 

"The CIA was unprepared to conduct a detention and interrogation program," he said. "Our officers inadequately developed and monitored its initial activities. The agency failed to establish quickly the operational guidelines needed to govern the entire effort."

Perhaps his most startling assessment of the CIA’s interrogation program came near the end of his formal presentation when he seemed to break ranks with the repeated contention by the agency and former Bush administration officials that the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques — EITs — had produced vital intelligence that led to terrorist leaders, disrupted plots and saved lives.

Brennan said the agency’s own reviews fell short of establishing definitively that the enhanced interrogation techniques had led detainees to make the revelations.

"Let me be clear, we have not concluded that it was the use of EITs within that program that allowed us to obtain useful information from detainees subjected to them," Brennan said. "The cause-and-effect relationship between the use of EITs and useful information subsequently provided by the detainee is, in my view, unknowable."

That comment in particular elicited praise from Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who has sparred repeatedly with Brennan over the program and who took to Twitter during his speech to offer a counter narrative to his assertions.

In a statement, Feinstein called the director’s assessment "a welcome change from the CIA’s position in the past that information was obtained as a direct result of EITs."

At the same time, she disagreed with Brennan’s assertion that it also was "unknowable" whether the information required to halt terrorist attacks could have been obtained from other sources. "The report shows that such information was obtained from other means," Feinstein said.