President Obama Makes Statement In The Briefing Room Of White House
President Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 Getty

A dozen Nobel Peace Prize winners are urging President Barack Obama to release a US Senate report detailing the CIA's use of torture post 9/11.

The laureates are calling for the Obama administration to give "full disclosure" of the extent of torture used by the US military, as well as the authorisation of torture and rendition by US officials after September 2001.

The open admission by the President of the United States that the country engaged in torture is a first step in the US coming to terms with a grim chapter in its history
- Open letter from 12 Nobel Peace Prize winners

In an open letter, published on The Community, 12 Nobel Peace Prize winners are calling for Obama, who was awarded the honour himself in 2009, to also completely close the military detention centre Guantanamo Bay.

The letter, organised by two of the laureates, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and former East Timor President José Ramos-Horta, was signed by 10 more Nobel Peace Prize winners.

They included Northern Ireland MP John Hume, who helped bring an end to the Troubles; leader of Liberia's powerful women's peace movement Leymah Gbowee; and FW de Klerk, the last president of Apartheid-era South Africa, who helped bring an end to white majority rule in the country along with Nelson Mandela.

The letter said: "The open admission by the President of the United States that the country engaged in torture is a first step in the US coming to terms with a grim chapter in its history.

"The subsequent release of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence summary report will be an opportunity for the country and the world to see, in at least some detail, the extent to which their government and its representatives authorised, ordered and inflicted torture on their fellow human beings.

"We have reason to feel strongly about torture. Many of us among the Nobel Peace Prize laureates have seen first-hand the effects of the use of torture in our own countries.

'Some are torture survivors ourselves. Many have also been involved in the process of recovery, of helping to walk our countries and our regions out of the shadows of their own periods of conflict and abuse.

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It added: "It is with this experience that we stand firmly with those Americans who are asking the US to bring its use of torture into the light of day, and for the United States to take the necessary steps to emerge from this dark period of its history, never to return."

Campaigners have long demanded the 6,000 page report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which details the amount torture conducted by the CIA following the 9/11 terrorism attack in New York.

The letter from the Nobel Peace Prize winners arrived after the Obama administration was given a December deadline to reveal why it has not made 2,100 photos depicting Iraqi and Afghanistan detainees being tortured public.

A federal judge has asked the US government to give reasoning, one image at a time, why they have been blocked from the public before deciding if they should be released.

The unreleased images are said to be more disturbing than the torture photos from Iraq prison Abu Ghraib by the US military that shocked the world in 2004.