A Senate official, who asked not to be named before the release of the report, said Sunday that its authors were saving their response to General Hayden, Mr. Rodriguez and others until the report was public so that they could review the facts they gathered and let Americans make up their own minds.

Image Former President George W. Bush in August. Credit... Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

According to those familiar with it, the 6,000-page report by the Senate Intelligence Committee takes a sharply critical view of the C.I.A.’s interrogation of terrorism suspects in the first years after the Sept. 11 attacks, questioning the efficacy of torture and revealing more details about the program. It also suggests C.I.A. officers in the field may have misled officials at headquarters.

Mr. Bush and his advisers have been largely quiet about the Senate report until now, and former intelligence officials worried whether the Bush team would defend them. Some former administration officials privately encouraged the president and his top advisers to use the report to disclaim responsibility for the interrogation program on the grounds that they were not kept fully informed.

But Mr. Bush and his inner circle rejected that suggestion. “Even if some officials privately believe they were not given all the facts, they feel it would be immoral and disloyal to throw the C.I.A. to the wolves at this point,” said one former official, who like others did not want to be identified speaking about the report before its release.

Another former official, who remains close to Mr. Bush, said the former president did not believe that the C.I.A. had misinformed him.

“The idea that George Tenet, John McLaughlin, Mike Hayden and Steve Kappes would knowingly mislead the president and the country is absurd,” the former official said. Mr. Kappes was another deputy C.I.A. director during the Bush era. “This was not a rogue program. And nobody in our administration is going to throw the C.I.A. over the side on this.”

The former officials said that neither Mr. Bush nor his advisers had been interviewed by the committee. William Burck, a former deputy White House counsel serving as a lawyer for Mr. Bush, was offered the opportunity to review the report on his behalf but only after it was written, at which point it was too late to offer meaningful input, former officials said. The offer at that point, they said, was declined.