WASHINGTON » President Barack Obama on Wednesday found himself caught in the middle of a collision between the Central Intelligence Agency and his own Democratic allies, who accused the White House of helping to cover up a legacy of torture and put the president on the defensive over an interrogation program he never supported.

A day after the Senate Intelligence Committee released a blistering report on the CIA’s interrogations of terrorism suspects a decade ago, Obama — who banned such methods when he took office — came under fire from Democrats on the committee for declining to endorse the report’s conclusion that they were ineffective and standing by the CIA director, John O. Brennan. His attempt to find a balance on a polarizing issue inherited from his predecessor was seen by those critics as a failure to hold the agency accountable.

Sen. Mark Udall of Colorado, a Democrat on the committee and a longtime critic of the CIA interrogations, took to the Senate floor to excoriate the agency for failing to come to terms with its mistakes and the White House for enabling its deceptions. Udall repeated his call for Brennan to resign.

"Director Brennan and the CIA today are continuing to willfully provide inaccurate information to misrepresent the efficacy of torture," Udall said. "In other words, the CIA is lying."

He added that the president had failed to exercise his responsibility.

"There can be no cover-up," Udall said. "There can be no excuses. If there is no moral leadership from the White House helping the public understand that the CIA’s torture program wasn’t necessary and didn’t save lives or disrupt terrorist plots, then what’s to stop the next White House and CIA director from supporting torture?"

Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, another Democrat on the committee, echoed the sentiment.

"I would hope there would be a bit of a housecleaning from the White House given the results of this report," he said in an interview. "The fundamental problem here is not just what happened but the continued resistance of the leadership of this agency to the basics of oversight."

The White House defended Brennan, a career CIA officer who served as Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser in the White House before the president sent him back to the agency last year as director.

"John Brennan is a decorated professional and a patriot," said Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary. "And he is somebody that the president relies on on a daily basis to keep this country safe."

After Tuesday’s release of the executive summary of the report, Obama repeated his belief that the techniques used after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, constituted torture and betrayed American values. But he declined to address the fundamental question raised by the report: Did they produce meaningful intelligence to stop terrorist attacks — or did the CIA mislead the White House and the public about their effectiveness, as the committee asserted?

That debate put Obama between two allies: the close adviser and former aide he installed as director of the CIA versus Democrats on the Intelligence Committee and the party’s liberal base that backs their findings. Instead, the president hoped to convince the public that the issue has now been confronted and resolved since he signed an order barring the controversial interrogation techniques shortly after taking office in January 2009.

"He’s between a rock and a hard place," said Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at the Fordham University School of Law. "The intelligence agency has become the lead agency in national security, and therefore he’s beholden to it, and there’s no getting around that. It’s much bigger than before 9/11. It’s not just about Brennan."

Indeed, in a written statement and a pair of television interviews after the report was released on Tuesday, Obama stressed his respect for the "patriots" of the CIA who worked to guard the nation in an uncertain and dangerous period, even as he concluded that the methods they used "did significant damage to America’s standing in the world."

While that frustrated critics of the CIA who wanted a more unambiguous condemnation of torture and its architects, others said his comments struck a reasonable middle ground.

"They seemed measured and responsible," said Cesar Conda, an adviser to Republicans like former Vice President Dick Cheney and Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida. "He’s walking a fine line between his base and his duties as commander in chief."

Instead, Republicans and supporters of the CIA saved their fire for the Senate Democrats who issued the report. Cheney, in his first public comments since its release, said he had read only summaries of it but denounced the report as "full of crap" and said it was a "flat-out lie" to suggest that President George W. Bush was kept in the dark about details of the program.

"He knew certainly the techniques," Cheney said on Fox News. "We did discuss the techniques. There was no effort on our part to keep him from that."

Cheney scoffed at the suggestion that methods like waterboarding, nudity, slapping and sleep deprivation violated human rights. "How nice do you want to be to the murderers of 3,000 Americans?" he asked.

For Obama, the report reopened a fight he had tried to avoid for nearly six years. Although he denounced torture during his 2008 campaign, he has resisted pressure from activists to hold anyone accountable. His Justice Department re-examined cases of prisoner abuse but did not prosecute anyone, and Obama rejected the creation of a "truth commission" and backed up the CIA in seeking redactions of the Senate report.

Obama supported the release of the declassified summary and said it should help ensure the country never again violates its fundamental values. But as a president receiving regular briefings on terrorist threats, he sees the situation differently than he did as a candidate, aides have said. In his statement Tuesday, he expressed empathy for the "agonizing choices" that Bush faced, and in an interview with Telemundo, he declined to say what he would have done in the same circumstances.

At his daily briefing, Obama’s spokesman, Earnest, spent an hour deflecting questions about whether the president believed the interrogations were ineffective and whether anyone should be punished. He repeatedly referred the latter question to the Justice Department.

"That is not a question for the president of the United States," Earnest said.

Udall argued that it was. His outcry on the Senate floor put the question of Obama’s support for Brennan squarely on the table. The senator said Brennan’s response to the Senate inquiry contradicted information in a review ordered by his predecessor, Leon E. Panetta, that mirrored the committee findings.

It was that review that incited a battle this year between Brennan and the committee. When CIA officers suspected that the committee had improperly gained access to the agency’s computers, they read the emails of committee investigators. Brennan ended up apologizing, but the incident exacerbated tensions between committee Democrats and the CIA.

"The CIA has lied to its overseers and the public, destroyed and tried to hold back evidence, spied on the Senate, made false charges against our staff, and lied about torture and the results of torture," Udall said. "And no one has been held to account."

Other Democrats expressed more support for the president’s predicament.

"You’re always going to have some tension even within an administration," Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania said in an interview. "Sometimes the tension can’t be accommodated, but that’s a decision he’ll have to make."

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