John Kerry - War Criminal?

Howard Owens ponders the implications of a Kerry quote:

Jon Henke uncovered this quote from John Kerry:

"I personally didn't see personal atrocities in the sense I saw somebody cut a head off or something like that," Kerry said. "However, I did take part in free-fire zones, I did take part in harassment and interdiction fire, I did take part in search-and-destroy missions in which the houses of noncombatants were burned to the ground. And all of these acts, I find out later on, are contrary to the Hague and Geneva conventions and to the laws of warfare. So in that sense, anybody who took part in those, if you carry out the application of the Nuremberg Principles, is in fact guilty."

If true, wouldn't this make Kerry a war criminal?

But here's the part that bothered me -- how do you become an officer in the Navy and NOT KNOW that the acts he alleged violated the Hague and Geneva conventions? Hell, I never made it past senior airman in the Air Force, and I knew that.

So in which part of Kerry's statement is he lying?