The US government failed to deliver a "standard of care" needed to protect its personnel at outposts in Benghazi, Libya, where four Americans died in a 2012 attack, according to a Senate report released Wednesday.

The long-awaited report by the Senate select committee on intelligence finds that the spying agencies and the state department made mistakes before and after the Benghazi attacks, which the report said were preventable.

However the report does not find substantiation for the sharpest charges to be made against the Obama administration over the attacks, including that officials willfully aired inaccurate talking points or delayed a military response to the attacks.

"We sincerely hope that ... the evidence in this report will end the misinformed and unhelpful talking points controversy once and for all," Democratic members of the committee said in an appendix to the report.

The report was based on oversight hearings, closed interviews, staff briefings, documents and video. It includes 14 findings, nearly 20 recommendations and a detailed description of three distinct attacks overnight from 11-12 September, 2012. An appendix lays out how talking points used by administration officials to describe the attacks were edited.

The committee's findings include that the attacks were not extensively planned by the perpetrators; the intelligence community did a good job of warning about the risk of an attack but a bad job of summarizing the attack when it happened; the state department screwed up by not beefing up security at the mission; nobody blocked any military response; and that the Obama administration was slow to produce a paper trail but was generally not a sinister actor in the episode.

"The collective assessment of the intelligence community remains that the attacks were deliberate and organized, but that their lethality and efficacy did not necessarily indicate extensive planning," the report says.

The committee lists seven separate intelligence reports in the run-up to the attacks warning of possible security threats. The reports bore titles such as "Libya: Terrorists Now Targeting US and Western Interests."

The report faults the state department for not acting on those reports. In one case, "the mission facility had received additional surveillance cameras, but they remained uninstalled because the State Department had not yet sent out the technical team necessary to install them," according to the report.

Intelligence analysts stumbled, however, after the attack occurred, the report finds. "In finished reports after September 11, 2012, intelligence analysts inaccurately referred to the presence of a protest at the Mission facility before the attack based on open source information and limited intelligence, but without sufficient intelligence or eyewitness statements to corroborate that assertion," the committee wrote. "The IC [intelligence community] took too long to correct these erroneous reports, which caused confusion and influenced the public statements of policymakers."

The US government knows who committed the attack, the report says, but the perpetrators remain at large. "The IC has identified several individuals responsible for the attacks. Some of the individuals have been identified with a strong level of confidence," the report says. "However, insight into the current whereabouts and links between these individuals in some cases is limited due in part to the nascent intelligence capabilities in the region."

The report pushes back against the notion that a broader military response to the attack was possible but not pursued. "There were no US military resources in position to intervene in short order in Benghazi to help defend the temporary mission facility and its annex," the report concludes. "The committee has reviewed the allegations that US personnel, including in the [intelligence community] or [defense department], prevented the mounting of any military relief effort during the attacks, but the committee has not found any of these allegations to be substantiated."

The document is somewhat self-contradicting, with a statement at the end by Republican members that keeps the talking points debate alive. "Today, it remains unclear exactly what was discussed during the deputies committee meeting that resulted in the final version of the talking points – or even who was present ..." they write.

The Republicans also mention, on page 76, a figure whose name does not appear elsewhere in the report: Hillary Clinton. "The final responsibility for security at diplomatic facilities lies with the former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton," the Republicans write. "At the end of the day, she was responsible for ensuring the safety of all Americans serving in our diplomatic facilities. Her failure to do so clearly made a difference in the lives of the four murdered Americans and their families."