Washington, D.C. ? Lawyers for the Bush administration told the CIA in 2002 that its officers could legally use waterboarding and other harsh measures while interrogating al-Qaida suspects, as long as they acted “in good faith” and did not deliberately seek to inflict severe pain, according to a Justice Department memo made public Thursday.

The memo, apparently intended to assuage CIA concerns that its officers could someday face torture charges, said interrogators needed only to possess an “honest belief” that their actions did not cause severe suffering. And the honest belief did not have to be based on reality.

“Although an honest belief need not be reasonable, such a belief is easier to establish where there is a reasonable basis for it,” stated the Aug. 1, 2002, memo signed by Jay S. Bybee, then an assistant attorney general with the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.

The memo was one of three released by the Justice Department under a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the American Civil Liberties Union. The heavily redacted memos offer insight into the administration’s legal maneuvering as it sought to justify the CIA’s program of aggressively interrogating high-level al-Qaida operatives held in secret prisons overseas. The program included waterboarding, or simulated drowning, as well as sleep deprivation and other measures intended to weaken resistance and coerce confessions.