The U.N. Human Rights Committee urged the United States on Thursday to release a report on a Bush-era interrogation program. Photo by Thomas Koehler/Photothek via Getty Images

A U.S. delegation addressed a United Nations panel Friday, insisting U.S. data-collection programs functioned within legal parameters and that steps had been taken to correct interrogation practices many in and outside the U.S. deem to be torture.

The U.S. presentation came in response to calls from a U.N. human rights watchdog to release a report on a Bush-era interrogation program at the heart of a dispute between the CIA and a Senate panel.

Critics, including experts on the U.N. civil and political rights panel, say the CIA program set up after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States included harsh interrogation methods that constituted torture banned by international law.

The U.N. Human Rights Committee began a two-day examination of the U.S. record on Thursday, its first scrutiny since 2006, attended by nearly 80 activist groups.

“It would appear that a Senator Dianne Feinstein claims that the computers of the Senate have been hacked into in the context of this investigation,” Victor Manuel Rodriguez-Rescia, a committee member from Costa Rica, told the U.S. delegation.

“In the light of this, we would like hear a commitment that this report will be disclosed, will be made public and therefore be declassified so that we the committee can really analyze what follow-up you have given to these hearings.”

Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said on Monday the CIA may have broken the law by spying on Congress, searching computers used by staffers researching operations including the use of simulated drowning or waterboarding.

CIA Director John Brennan denied the agency had engaged in such spying activities on the Senate committee.

A key issue is how the Senate committee acquired what Feinstein and others describe as the CIA's own internal review of its interrogation tactics and secret prisons, and its use of “rendition,” a practice by which prisoners are transferred between countries without formal judicial process.