Clinton's Bosnia gunfire claim untrue

[Steve Gardner]

This reminds me of the old joke:

Q. How do you know when a politician is lying?
A. They open their mouth.

How wonderful that Clinton should be exposed in this way. How sad that so few people will take much notice.

Source: news.com.au

DEMOCRAT Hillary Clinton has been forced to admit her dramatic account of coming under life-threatening sniper fire during a 1996 trip to Bosnia was inaccurate.

Senator Clinton's spokesman Howard Wolfson admitted the former first lady may have "misspoke" when she recounted the story on the campaign trail, as she tried to talk up her national security experience.

Senator Clinton had last week told of coming under sniper fire when she arrived at Bosnia's Tuzla airbase in March 1996.

"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," Senator Clinton had recounted.

But reporters who accompanied her on the 1996 trip have since produced TV footage that shows nothing of the sort, as Senator Clinton, accompanied by her daughter Chelsea, greeted wellwishers on their arrival and paused to chat.

Reruns of TV reports from the time showed Senator Clinton being welcomed by smiling officials on the tarmac at Tuzla, and listening as an eight-year-old Bosnian girl read out a poem.

Mr Wolfson insisted the Tuzla trip, designed as a morale-booster for US troops keeping the peace after Bosnia's civil war, took place in an atmosphere of danger.

But he admitted: "Now it is possible in the most recent instance in which she discussed this that she misspoke with regard to the exit from the plane".

The comedian Sinbad, who was also on the 1996 trip with Senator Clinton but is supporting her rival Barack Obama in the presidential campaign, said the most worrying part of the trip was deciding where to go for dinner.

And Senator Clinton's White House schedules - released last week and detailing her activities as first lady - confirm the ceremonial greeting she received in Tuzla.

Senator Obama's campaign has used the schedules to buttress its claim that the New York senator dishonestly inflates her resume to argue that she is ready to be commander-in-chief.

The schedules also fail to shed much light on Senator Clinton's assertions that as first lady to president Bill Clinton, she played an instrumental role in bringing peace to Northern Ireland or in opening Macedonia's borders to Kosovo refugees.

Senator Obama has no events planned until Wednesday, and is reportedly on vacation with his family in the US Virgin Islands.

But his campaign said Senator Clinton would do anything to win, while her aides accused him of stooping to gutter politics as an Obama supporter recalled the Monica Lewinsky scandal and Bill Clinton's impeachment trial.

The sniping was sure to deepen fears among some Democrats that the discord could boost Republican John McCain, who has touted his foreign policy credentials, heading into November's general election.

"My Democrat opponents who want to pull out of Iraq refuse to understand what's being said and what's happening, and that is, the central battleground is Iraq in this struggle against radical Islamic extremism," McCain said.

Eyeing working-class voters in Pennsylvania, which hosts the next crucial nominating contest on April 22, Senator Clinton called for emergency action to alleviate a mortgage crisis she said threatened the "American dream".

She called on President George W Bush to appoint former Federal Reserve chiefs Alan Greenspan and Paul Volcker, and ex-Treasury secretary Robert Rubin, to a bipartisan panel to report on the depth of the crisis within three weeks.

But the Obama camp dismissed the speech as a warming over of already discussed campaign themes, and said Senator Clinton was "wallowing" in millions of dollars from economic special interest groups she was now vowing to challenge.