US Election 2008
Clinton ‘Misspoke’ About Bosnia Trip, Campaign Says
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Mar 24, 2008 - 5:13:16 PM

The Clinton campaign says Senator Hillary Clinton may have “misspoke” recently when she said she had to evade sniper fire when she was visiting Bosnia in 1996 as first lady.

She has been using the episode as an example of her foreign policy bona fides.
“I certainly do remember that trip to Bosnia,” she said last week. “There was a saying around the White House that if a place was too small, too poor, or too dangerous, the president couldn’t go, so send the First Lady.
“I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.”
But her account has been challenged, first by Sinbad, the comedian, who traveled with her, and then by news organizations, most notably the Washington Post, which awarded her four “Pinnochios” which it gives for major “whoppers.”

A number of videos have been posted to YouTube juxtaposing a CBS news report with Mrs. Clinton’s statements last week:

Asked today to square her recent descriptions with these accounts, Howard Wolfson, her spokesman, referred to several contemporaneous news accounts that described the region as hostile. He then added: “It is possible in the most recent instance in which she discussed this that she misspoke in regard to the exit from the plane, but there is no question if you look at contemporaneous accounts that she was going to a potential combat zone, that she was on the front lines.”
Asked at a later point in the call to clarify his comment, Mr. Wolfson said that news accounts at the time made clear that the area in which she was landing was “a potential combat zone and was hazardous.”
He said that in her memoir, “Living History,” she wrote about sniper fire in the hills and “clearly meant to say that” when she brought it up last week. He said she had described the event many times the same way and that “in one instance she said it slightly differently.”
A third reporter then asked about it, prompting Mr. Howard to read the relevant passage from her book, in which she wrote: “Due to reports of snipers in the hills around the airstrip, we were forced to cut short an event on the tarmac with local children.” He repeated that this was the one time in which she misspoke.
But this formulation was at least the second time in recent weeks that she described the sniper fire. She mentioned it on Feb. 29 in Waco, Tex., when she was rolling out her “red phone” commercial, recalling the trip to Bosnia and saying that the welcoming ceremony “had to be moved inside because of sniper fire.”