Hillary Clinton’s campaign has admitted she “misspoke” last week when saying she had landed under sniper fire during a trip to Bosnia as first lady in March 1996.
Campaigners for Barack Obama, who has a narrow lead over Mrs Clinton in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, had suggested the statement about the Bosnia trip was a deliberate exaggeration by Mrs Clinton.
She often cites the goodwill trip with her daughter and several celebrities as an example of her foreign policy experience.
During a speech on Iraq, she said of the Bosnia trip: "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."
Media reports at the time said that Mrs Clinton was placed under no extraordinary risks on the trip.
One of her companions told the
Washington Posthe has no recollection either of the threat or reality of gunfire.
When asked today about the New York senator's remarks about the trip, Mrs Clinton's spokesman pointed to her written account of it in her book,
Living History, in which she described a shortened welcoming ceremony at Tuzla Air Base, Bosnia-Herzegovina.
"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, though we did have time to meet them and their teachers and to learn how hard they had worked during the war to continue classes in any safe spot they could find," Mrs Clinton wrote.
"That is what she wrote in her book," the spokeswoman said. "That is what she has said many, many times and on one occasion she misspoke."
Asked about the issue during a meeting with the
Philadelphia Daily News'editorial board today, Mrs Clinton said she "misspoke".
"I went to 80 countries, you know. I gave contemporaneous accounts, I wrote about a lot of this in my book. You know, I think that, a minor blip, you know, if I said something that, you know, I say a lot of things - millions of words a day - so if I misspoke, that was just a misstatement," she said.
AP