thats odd because you shouldn't have any 2's in the db, only 0 or 1 ..right?
maybe instead of having 1,2,3,4 columns with a 0 or 1 have one column named user_level with an enum of 1,2,3,4 default of your lowest level or even a zero
then you could change that query to
$sql = mysql_query("SELECT file_name FROM policies WHERE user_level='$ul'");
also, just to do a tiny bit of db optimization..
`1` varchar(45) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
`2` varchar(45) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
`3` varchar(45) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
`4` varchar(45) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
if those are only ever going to be a 1 or a 0...you don't need a limit of (45)...change that limit to (1)...or go with enum '0','1'