WASHINGTON – President Bush’s attorney general nominee, Alberto Gonzales, yesterday denied that he played a key role in crafting the administration’s contentious interrogation policies, portraying himself as a mere conduit between the White House and Justice Department lawyers who devised legal rationales for coercive interrogation methods.

Mr. Gonzales, who has served as White House counsel for the past four years, assured senators at his confirmation hearing that he was “sensitive” to the fact that as head of the Justice Department he would no longer serve the president, but the American people and the Constitution.

“I understand the differences between the two roles,” he told a crowded hearing room that included members of his family as well as torture survivors who object to his nomination.

The tone of the hearing veered from warm compliments for his “inspiring” life story as one of seven children of poor migrant workers who rose to national prominence, to sometimes tense questioning of his legal judgment and alleged reticence to disagree with the president.

After coming under fire for authoring a memo that belittled parts of the Geneva Conventions as outmoded and that reasoned they did not apply to Taliban fighters in Afghanistan, Mr. Gonzales vowed yesterday that as attorney general he would ensure that the American government complied with all domestic and international legal obligations in waging the war on terrorism.

“Contrary to reports, I consider the Geneva Conventions neither obsolete nor quaint,” he said in a prepared statement.

Under questioning by Senator Schumer, however, Mr. Gonzales said the administration had given preliminary thought to making changes to the Geneva Conventions.

“Geneva was ratified in 1949 … and I think it is appropriate to revisit whether or not Geneva should be revisited,” Mr. Gonzales said.

He said that while the basic principle underlying the treaty, the “decent treatment of human beings,” should remain intact, lawyers within the government have discussed whether the treaty should be modified, although there has not been a “systematic project” to alter it, he said.

Mr. Schumer also asked Mr. Gonzales to be more forthcoming with Congress and the public.

“The previous attorney general ran the most secretive Justice Department in my lifetime,” the New York senator said. “Will you be a voice for inclusion and consultation, or will you be continuing the John Ashcroft ‘my way or the highway’ approach that often leads to – led to – embarrassment … on Department of Justice’s part and others’?”

Mr. Gonzales pledged to be “more available” to the committee than his predecessor. Senators complained that Mr. Ashcroft appeared before them only five times in four years.

Mr. Schumer told Mr. Gonzales that on the issue of judicial appointments, “You and I have worked out things very well together in New York State. Every vacancy is filled. They’re filled with moderate or conservative but mainstream judges. But we had a real dialogue. You would bounce names off of me. I would bounce names off of you. There were some, each of us said to the other, are not acceptable, and they were pulled off the table.”

Mr. Gonzales replied that consultation has “always been good” and said he would “make the president aware of your request.”

Senators spent much of the hearing pressing Mr. Gonzales to explain his opinions of an August 2002 Justice Department memo he requested interpreting an anti-torture statute. The memo’s analysis has come under fire for narrowing the interpretation of torture to cover only cases of serious injury, organ failure, or death.

A witness before the committee, the dean of Yale Law School, Harold Koh, said the definition would have left out some of the punishments inflicted by Saddam Hussein on his prisoners, including the pulling out of fingernails and beatings.

The memo also suggested the president could override anti-torture laws in some cases.

The Bush administration repudiated the memo last month, but Democrats said that for the intervening two years it had allowed a “permissive” attitude among American forces that contributed to the abuses at the Abu Ghraib Prison in Baghdad.

Senator Graham, a Republican of South Carolina, also criticized the memo, telling Mr. Gonzales that it put American troops in jeopardy because it appeared to sanction activities that were contrary to the military law.

Mr. Gonzales told senators he could not recall whether he had approved or agreed with the memo’s legal reasoning, what specific role he played in drafting the memo, or whether it had been written at his own request or at the behest of the Central Intelligence Agency.

“Did you agree with that interpretation of the torture statute back in August 2002?”Senator Leahy of Vermont asked.

Mr. Gonzales replied, “I don’t recall today whether or not I was in agreement with all of the analysis, but I don’t have a disagreement with the conclusions then reached by the department. Ultimately, it is the responsibility of the department to tell us what the law means, senator.”

Mr. Gonzales also stopped short of repudiating the memo’s conclusion that the president could override statutes forbidding torture. Instead, he deflected the question as hypothetical. Asked whether other world leaders could authorize the use of torture against American citizens, Mr. Gonzales said he did not know.

However, Mr. Gonzales repudiated the use of torture.

“Do you approve of torture?” asked Senator Specter of Pennsylvania.

“Absolutely not, senator,” Mr. Gonzales replied.

Mr. Gonzales also had trouble remembering when Mr. Kennedy asked him to confirm press reports that he chaired meetings at which various interrogation techniques were discussed and given legal blessing, including the threat of live burial and water boarding – the strapping of a detainee to a board and pushing him under water to make him believe he might drown.

The Washington Post has reported that Mr. Gonzales ordered the August 2002 memo after the Central Intelligence Agency asked how much pain and suffering interrogators could inflict – without violating anti-terror laws — on a high-ranking Al Qaeda detainee who was resisting interrogation but was thought to know about future attacks.

“Sir, I don’t have specific recollection,” Mr. Gonzales responded. “I read the same article. I don’t know whether or not it was the CIA.”

He added that, “What I can say is that after this war began against this new kind of threat, this new kind of enemy, we realized that there was a premium on receiving information.”

Mr. Gonzales demurred when Mr. Leahy pressed him about why he had approved the nomination of a former New York City police commissioner, Bernard Kerik, as the secretary of the Homeland Security department, despite widely reported allegations of marital infidelities and ethical breaches.

Mr. Gonzales said he preferred not to discuss his conversation with Mr.Kerik, who withdrew his nomination on the grounds that he discovered that he had not paid Social Security taxes for an immigrant nanny.

Mr. Leahy said the incident left questions about Mr. Gonzales’s judgment.

“There is some concern that if the president wants something, you’re going to go ahead and make it work, which ….works against the idea of the independence of the attorney general, who’s there not as the president’s attorney general [but] the attorney general for the whole United States,” he said.

In contrast, Senator Cornyn, a Republican of Texas, mounted a vigorous defense of Mr. Gonzales’s job performance. “Only in Washington can a good man get raked over the coals for doing his job,” he said at one point.

The hearing marked the debut of Mr. Specter as chair of the committee. The moderate Republican overcame organized opposition to his elevation by conservative groups who considered him too liberal on abortion and other issues.

His declarations of loyalty to the president in recent months did not keep Mr. Specter from pressing Mr. Gonzales on the issue of torture or expressing concern over certain provisions of the Patriot Act and the detentions of non-citizens after he received the gavel from outgoing chairman Senator Hatch of Utah.

Mr. Gonzales fielded a volley of questions, ranging from Mr. Schumer’s inquiry as whether the Vice President should be allowed to rule that a simple majority of senators can confirm a judicial appointee (Mr. Gonzales declined to express an opinion) to his position on Roe v. Wade (Mr. Gonzales said he considers the case to be settled law and would defend it in court).

Mr. Gonzales also denounced the abuses of prisoners in military custody at the Abu Ghraib Prison in Baghdad, which he said “sickened and outraged me, and left a stain on our nation’s reputation.”

But he rejected suggestions by some Democratic senators that legal memos that he wrote or approved created a permissive atmosphere that led to abuses.

Soldiers who piled naked detainees into human pyramids were “simply people who were morally bankrupt trying – having fun. And I condemn that,” Mr. Gonzales said.

He said investigations into improperly coercive interrogation techniques used at the prison concluded that the root cause was “the fact that you had a prison that was outmanned, under-resourced, focused on fighting an insurgency, and they didn’t pay enough attention to detainee operations.”