A LEAKED White House document concludes that the CIA kept the US secretary of state and some ambassadors in the dark about brutal interrogation techniques and secret prisons.

An internal briefing on an upcoming Senate report on the CIA interrogation programme was accidentally emailed to a reporter, the Associated Press news agency said.

According to the briefing, the still-classified full report maintains ambassadors who were informed about interrogations at black sites were instructed not to tell their State Department superiors.

The four-page White House document is significant because it reveals some of the report’s conclusions as well as State Department concerns over how it will be portrayed around the world.

Allegedly, the Senate report concludes the CIA used brutal techniques on detainees and then misled Congress and the Justice Department.

The briefing said the full report “leaves no doubt that the methods used to extract information from some terrorist suspects caused profound pain, suffering and humiliation. 

“It also leaves no doubt the harm caused by the use of these techniques outweighed any potential benefit.”

Those methods included slapping, humiliation, exposure to cold, sleep deprivation and waterboarding.

The report may not draw the conclusion that the CIA actions legally constituted torture, but it makes clear that in some cases they amounted to torture by common definition.

According to the leaked document, the State Department wants to embrace the conclusions of the Senate report and blast past CIA practices.

“This report tells a story of which no American is proud,” it says.