Kerry Raises Iraq Abuse Questions

Sen. John F. Kerry said Tuesday that newly disclosed Bush administration legal records on torture raise “serious questions about how high” responsibility for the Iraq prisoner abuse scandal goes.

Kerry said President Bush had incorrectly left the impression that “just a few people” were involved in the U.S. military’s mistreatment of detainees.

The memos raise “very, very serious questions about the messages that went out to leadership within the military and especially, ultimately, to the rank and file,” the presumed Democratic presidential nominee said.

“Already, we’ve seen it’s not just a few people, and there are serious questions about how high it goes,” he said.

The memos by administration lawyers suggested the president and the military could be exempt from federal laws and international treaties that bar torture.

When Bush was asked about the memos last week, he said he could not recall reading them, but instructed his administration that “anything we did would conform to U.S. law and would be consistent with international treaty obligations.”

“The president said that we followed whatever was required by the law,” Kerry said. “But obviously, in new memoranda that we’ve seen, they’ve interpreted the law as allowing [the prisoner abuse]. So which is it?”

Kerry suggested Bush had failed to grasp the full scope of the damage the Abu Ghraib prison scandal had inflicted on America’s reputation abroad.

He also criticized the administration’s policy of exempting its Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention center for terrorism suspects from Geneva Convention rules that bar torture.

“The Geneva Conventions are not there to protect other people,” Kerry said. “They’re there to help protect our soldiers. We don’t want our young men and women, from Ohio and other places, tortured. And unless you set the highest moral standards, you are inviting trouble.”

Kerry said if he were president, he would have named an outside investigator to “restore people’s faith in getting to the bottom of” the prison scandal.

He listed as a possible leader of such an inquiry Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the maverick Republican whose name comes up frequently in Kerry’s speeches. Kerry has talked with McCain about the prospect of him becoming the Massachusetts senator’s running mate.

But McCain rejected those overtures.