The White House is under growing pressure to hold individuals accountable for covering up the torture of terrorist suspects, with calls coming from a senator for a purge of top CIA officials and a furious row over whether the agency kept both Congress and the previous administration sufficiently informed of the programme.

In his first televised remarks since Tuesday’s damning Senate report, President Obama sought to partially justify the actions of President George W Bush and the CIA, while acknowledging he believed they had backfired by harming America’s moral standing in the world.

“Nobody can fully understand what it was like to be responsible for the safety and security of the American people in the aftermath of the worst attack on our national soil,” he told the Spanish-language television channel Telemundo. “When countries are threatened, oftentimes they act rationally in ways that in retrospect were wrong.”

And his spokesman, Josh Earnest, later poured cold water on claims in the Senate report that the CIA had kept the worst of its behaviour hidden from President Bush.

“That’s a point of some contention,” he said, when asked whether the CIA had lied to the White House. “There are some people who have said that that’s not true.”

This pushback against what many insiders perceive as an attempt to isolate the intelligence community from Washington’s political leaders was also supported by the former CIA director Michael Hayden, who gave an interview to Politico magazine in which he insisted that Bush was kept fully abreast of the programme and that he had approved the use of waterboarding as early as 2002, and had publicly acknowledged having done so.

But the Democratic senator Mark Udall, an outgoing member of the intelligence committee and a leading congressional critic of intelligence overreach, called for a clean sweep of the CIA leadership implicated in the report, and argued that the agency was continuing to mislead, with White House support.

“Director [John] Brennan and the CIA are continuing to wilfully provide inaccurate information and misrepresent the efficacy of torture. In other words, the CIA is lying,” Udall said in what may be his final major Washington address after he was defeated in November’s midterm elections.

Udall first called on Brennan to resign in August, after Brennan conceded that agency officials had inappropriately accessed emails and work product of Senate torture investigators on a shared computer network.

But he stepped up the attack in the wake of the torture report’s publication, saying “the CIA has lied to its overseers and the public”, and blasting the White House for not holding anyone “to account”, insisting “actions speak louder than words”.

Udall argued that the cover-up has continued until recently, pointing to discrepancies between evidence the CIA gave to Congress and an internal report by the former defense secretary Leon Panetta. “[The CIA] knowingly provided inaccurate information to the committee in the present day, which is a serious offence and a deeply troubling matter for the committee, the Congress, the White House and our country,” said Udall.

Yet Obama’s spokesman went out of his way to defend Brennan on Wednesday, denying that he had lied about any aspect of the torture inquiry.

“He is somebody who, I think, adheres to the highest ethical standard that you would expect of a government official, and I don’t think there’s any reason for anybody to question that,” said Earnest.

The White House also insists it is up to the Department of Justice to decide whether to reopen a previously closed criminal inquiry into whether charges should be brought against those responsible. Instead, it argues that allowing the report to be published goes a long way to repairing damage to America’s reputation and preventing future instances of torture.

“I think ‘fessing up’… the willingness to come clean, does a lot to rebuild our moral authority around the globe,” said Earnest.

Obama also acknowledged that torture had proved counter-productive by damaging US moral authority, although he stopped short of agreeing with the Senate report that no useful intelligence was gathered that could not have been obtained elsewhere.

“We know that oftentimes when someone is being subjected to these kinds of techniques they are willing to say anything to alleviate the pain and distress they are feeling. We have got better ways of doing things,” he said in his television interview.

Asked if he was concerned the CIA could still be hiding things from him, Obama said no: “I have been very explicit … in prohibiting these techniques. Anybody who was doing the kind of things described in the report would not simply be keeping something from me, they would be directly violating the orders I have issued as commander-in-chief.”

Obama stuck to his line of condemning past actions without taking sides in the debate over whether there was a cover-up or people should be held accountable.

“In the aftermath of 9/11, in the midst of a national trauma, and uncertainty about whether these attacks were going to repeat themselves, what’s clear is that the CIA set up something very fast without a lot of forethought,” he told Telemundo.

“The lines of accountability that needed to be set up weren’t always in place and that some of these techniques that were described were not only wrong were counterproductive.”

He also said that while it was impossible to imagine the pressures after 9/11, that “does not excuse all of us from looking squarely at what happened and make sure that it doesn’t happen again”.

“It’s important for us not to paint any broad-brush [picture] about all the incredible dedicated professionals in out intelligence community based on some actions that were contrary to who we are – but it’s also important for us to face up to the fact that when countries are threatened often they act rashly in ways that, in retrospect, were wrong,” he said.

“We need to acknowledge that in part in order build in place systems, so that if – heaven forbid – we find out ourselves under the kind of direct threats that have occurred in the past that we recognise the dangers ahead of time and do better.”