WASHINGTON -- President Bush's nominee for attorney general, Alberto R. Gonzales, yesterday fielded tough questions from Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats about whether he condoned extreme interrogation methods for detainees in the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and whether administration policy on torture led to U.S. soldiers' abuses of those held at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

AP file photo Alberto R. Gonzales

During six hours of testimony, the White House chief counsel said torture and abuse would not be tolerated by the administration and he had been "surprised and shocked" by recent abuses reported at Guantanamo Bay. If confirmed as attorney general, which appears all but certain, he said he would investigate why those recent abuses occurred.

"I am and will remain deeply committed to ensuring that the United States government complies with all of its legal obligations as it fights the war on terror," Gonzales told the committee. He said that included honoring the Geneva Conventions on treatment of war prisoners "whenever they apply."

In his legal opinions, Gonzales has said he believes that protections required under the Geneva Conventions do not apply to members of Afghanistan's former Taliban regime or of the al-Qaida global terror network. Yesterday, he did not retreat from that view. But he did back away from his statements in a 2002 memorandum that the Geneva Conventions were "quaint and obsolete."

In making their case to promote Gonzales to the role of the nation's chief law enforcement officer, his committee supporters touted his inspirational life story -- recounting how the son of migrant workers from Humble, Texas, used his pluck and determination to escape poverty and become the first in his family to attend college, at Rice University before heading to Harvard Law School.

Fellow Texan Sen. John Cornyn described Gonzales as a modest, self-effacing man who was getting "raked over the coals" despite his accomplishments, purely because of Democrats' partisanship.

Yet newly elected Sen. Kenneth L. Salazar, D-Colo, himself the former attorney general of his home state, introduced Gonzales as someone who was "better qualified than many recent attorneys general," pointing to his work as Texas secretary of state and a justice of the Texas Supreme Court before becoming the president's top lawyer.

But other Democratic senators returned again and again to Gonzales' legal judgments after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and how he balanced the desire to glean crucial information from enemy combatants against the U.S. responsibility to treat detainees in a humane way.

The committee's ranking Democrat, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, as well as Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., repeatedly asked Gonzales whether the scandal at Abu Ghraib was connected to the administration's decision in 2002 to narrow the definition of what constitutes torture. A much-debated Justice Department legal memo from August 2002 equated torture to pain equivalent in intensity to that "accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death."

Gonzales said he did not believe that the torture definition and the Iraqi prison abuses were linked and argued that what happened at Abu Ghraib could be attributed to "morally bankrupt" individual soldiers.

Each time he was asked about whether he agreed with the administration's narrowed definition of torture, Gonzales said the question was irrelevant because the Justice Department had recently dismissed that definition. Bush's position, he said, is that all detainees should be treated humanely.

"This is not about the president and his judgment. You're going to be the AG," retorted Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., D-Del. "You are no longer the president's lawyer. You are the people's lawyer."

Under intense questioning from Kennedy, Gonzales said he could not recall how the 2002 memos interpreting what constituted torture were drafted or exactly what role he had played in their development. But when pressed further, he said he never influenced or asked the Justice Department's lawyers to "bless" extreme interrogation techniques, such as live burial or water-boarding -- a technique intended to make a detainee feel as if he is drowning.