U.S. broadens definition of torture

WASHINGTON -- The Justice Department has broadened its definition of torture, significantly retreating from a memorandum in August 2002 that defined torture extremely narrowly and said President Bush could ignore domestic and international prohibitions against torture in the name of national security.

The new definition was in a memorandum posted on the department's Web site late Thursday night with no public announcement. It comes one week before the Senate Judiciary Committee is set to question Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel and nominee for attorney general, about his role in formulating legal policies that critics have said led to abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and at the naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The new memorandum, first reported in The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, largely dismisses the August 2002 definition, especially the part that asserted that mistreatment rose to the level of torture only if it produced severe pain equivalent to that associated with organ failure or death.

"Torture is abhorrent both to American law and values and to international norms," said the new memorandum, written by Daniel Levin, the acting assistant attorney general in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel, which had produced the earlier definition.

Gonzales, who will go before the Senate committee for confirmation hearings, served as a supervisor and coordinator inside the administration as lawyers drafted new approaches on the limits of coercive techniques in interrogations and the scope of the president's authority in fighting a war against terrorists.

A memorandum in January 2002 to Bush that Gonzales signed sided with the Justice Department in asserting that the Geneva Conventions did not bind the United States in its treatment of detainees captured in the fighting in Afghanistan.

The August 2002 Justice Department memorandum and a later memorandum from an administration legal task force with similar conclusions were widely denounced in Congress and by human rights groups as cornerstones in the approach to detainees that led to abuses at Abu Ghraib and at the detention center in Guantanamo.

The political effect of the new memorandum on Gonzales' appearance before the committee was unclear. He has been expected to assert, as he has before, that neither he nor Bush condones torture.

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