Reminds me of Hillary's sniper story.
7:01PM GMT 25 Mar 2008
Hillary Clinton has conceded that she "did misspeak" about landing in Bosnia under sniper fire, blaming tiredness for a dramatic description that was shown to have been significantly exaggerated.
Widespread derision of her comments about a visit to Tuzla in 1996.
"I remember landing under sniper fire," she said in Washington on Monday. "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."
News footage of the event however showed her claims to have been wide of the mark, and reporters who accompanied her stated that there was no sniper fire. Her account was ridiculed by ABC News as "like a scene from Saving Private Ryan".
After initially dismissing the controversy over her comments as a "minor blip", she told a Pittsburgh radio station: "You know I have written about this and described it in many different settings and I did misspeak the other day. This has been a very long campaign. Occasionally, I am a human being like everybody else."
She insisted it was the "first time in 12 years" she had spoken inaccurately about the trip.
But her Bosnia anecdote has been a regular feature of her stump speeches.
On the trip, the then First Lady and her daughter Chelsea, then 16, emerged smiling from a C-17 transport plane to be met by Emina Bicakcic, eight, who told them: "There is peace now because Mr Clinton signed it. All this peace. I love it."
The Clintons were accompanied on the visit by the comedian Sinbad and the singer Sheryl Crow, who gave a morale-boosting concert for the troops.
On Feb 29 she stated that the greeting ceremony "had to be moved inside because of sniper fire" while on Dec 29 she said that she had "landed in one of those corkscrew landings and ran out because they said there might be sniper fire".
Mrs Clinton told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review that she had made the mistake about sniper fire because she had been "sleep-deprived". Her schedule showed she had no public engagements the day before her Washington speech and she spent the night in her Embassy Row home.
The footage of the Tuzla visit juxtaposed with her recent comments played repeatedly on American television networks and was viewed hundreds of thousands of time on the video-sharing website YouTube.
Mrs Clinton had cited the Bosnia trip, along with having been "instrumental" in bringing peace to Northern Ireland, as a central foreign policy qualification and a reason she would be "ready on day one" to be American commander-in-chief.
Advisers to Mr Obama seized on the issue, which feeds into a existing perception of Mrs Clinton as lacks candour. A Gallup poll last week found that just 44 per cent of Americans considered her "honest and trustworthy", compared to 63 per cent for Mr Obama and 67 per cent for Mr McCain, the Republican nominee.
The Clinton campaign initially tried to shut down debate about the Bosnia remarks, refusing to answer a reporter's question on a conference call saying that they would supply a transcript of the communications director's remarks from Monday.
But Clinton advisers later changed tack, issuing a press release entitle "Just Embellished Words: Senator Obama's Record of Exaggerations & Misstatements" listing occasions on which Mr Obama had apparently misspoken.
The last of the Clinton campaign's 10 examples was one from last autumn when a weary Mr Obama told a crowd that 10,000 instead of 10 people had been killed by a tornado in Kansas.
