Leon Panetta, the CIA director, has confirmed that controversial "enhanced interrogation techniques" such as waterboarding yielded some of the intelligence information that ultimately led to Osama bin Laden.

"In the intelligence business you work from a lot of sources of information and that was true here," he told NBC News. "It's a little difficult to say it was due just to one source of information that we got. I think some of the detainees clearly were, you know, they used these enhanced interrogation techniques against some of these detainees."

The White House and its Capitol Hill allies had earlier been at pains to state that such techniques, used under the Bush administration but banned by Mr Obama as amounting to torture, had not played a part in yielding significant information.

Mr Panetta's admission lays Mr Obama open to politically explosive claims that bin Laden would not have been killed had it not been for the use of those techniques by the Bush administration.

In his 2009 Senate confirmation hearings, Mr Panetta, a moderate Democrat and former California congressman, argued that "waterboarding is torture and it's wrong."

But he stated candidly last night that discussion about its use will continue. "Whether we would have gotten the same information through other approaches I think is always gonna be an open question," he said.

Mr Panetta's comments come hours after Eric Holder, the US Attorney General, defended as lawful the intelligence gathering and raid that resulted in the death of bin Laden...

American officials have said that one of the crucial clues that led to bin Laden was a piece of information about an al-Qaeda courier that came from September 11th mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or from the so-called 20th hijacker, Mohammad al-Qahtani.

It is acknowledged that both Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and Mohammad al-Qahtani had been subjected to enhanced interrogation, a policy authorised by Mr Bush.

"We used this technique on three people, captured a lot of people and used it on three. We gained value; information to protect the country. And it was the right thing to do as far as I'm concerned," Mr. Bush said in an interview in 2010.

The debate about such methods has now been re-ignited, and fuelled by Mr. Panetta's comments.

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