President Obama is under pressure to start an investigation into the Bush Administration’s torture and antiterrorism programmes after fresh revelations about a cover-up.

Mr Obama has been reluctant to pursue any such inquiry and is concerned that it would open political divisions and endanger his urgent domestic agenda of economic rescue, healthcare reform and dealing with climate change.

A slew of revelations about previously unknown intelligence programmes and the involvement of the Bush Administration in concealing them has brought mounting calls from the Democratic Party for an inquiry.

On Saturday The New York Times reported that Dick Cheney, the former Vice-President, had ordered that one CIA programme begun after September 11, 2001, be kept secret from Congress. It was a decision that some believe was illegal.

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that the programme involved proposals to provide US intelligence agencies with the capability to capture or kill al-Qaeda operatives as authorised by a presidential pronouncement.

Several sources said that the programme was in the planning stages and never crossed the agency’s threshold for reporting to congressional overseers. The involvement of Mr Cheney has raised questions about the role of politics in such decision making.

The Democratic chairmen of the Senate’s judicial and intelligence committee called separately for investigations into the programme and its concealment. Others called for any inquiry that is held to include all Bush-era intelligence activities of questionable legality.

Eric Holder, the Attorney-General, is considering whether to appoint a prosecutor to carry out a criminal inquiry into brutal interrogation techniques and the issuing of legal justifications.

Dianne Feinstein, a senator and the chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, told Fox News Sunday that Mr Cheney’s concealment of the programme from her committee was “a big problem, because the law is very clear”.

She was not aware of the programme until last month when Leon Panetta, the incoming CIA chief, told the committee what he had discovered after taking up the job.

“I think if the intelligence committees had been briefed they could have watched the programme, they could have asked for reports on the programme, they could have made judgments about the programme as it went along,” Mrs Feinstein said.

Patrick Leahy, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said that he would favour an investigation because of the level of mystery still surrounding the programmes.

President Obama has previously resisted Democratic pressure for an inquiry into Bush-era anti-terrorist programmes, saying that the nation should be “looking forward and not backwards”.

He is also wary of Republican accusations that he is soft on national security even from those opposed to the Bush-era’s harsh methods.

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