On February 29, Hillary stated that the greeting ceremony “had to be moved inside because of sniper fire.”
On March 17, Clinton described the same trip yet again but this time said that she now remembered “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.”
Only after videos showed her walking calmly off the plane and meeting a little Bosnian girl in a small ceremony on the airstrip, Hillary said that she “misspoke” about snipers.
“So I made a mistake. That happens. It proves I’m human, which, you know, for some people, is a revelation,” Hillary said, blaming tiredness for her “misspeaking.”
BBC writes that the word “misspoke” is a useful one in this context. It implies that “something which feels like a lie is really little more than a slip of the tongue.”
But the sniper tale was neither a mistake nor misspeaking. Dodging snipers in Bosnia was a part of her speeches prepared with her staff in advance.
It seems that her campaign decided to pick some remote place that Hillary visited in the past, exaggerate the story, and use it to boost her “leadership” experience.
Of course, war-torn Bosnia was a great choice. Most people in America remember Bosnia for nothing else but news reports about a brutal war, bombings, and sniper fire that killed 100,000 people in the early 1990s.
Blinded by their own ignorance and willing to do anything to boost Hillary’s image, Clinton’s team completely forgot that the American media, a comedian, and a musician accompanied Hillary on that trip. They did not care that the war in Bosnia was already over when she arrived, or that Tuzla, the city that Hillary visited, was one of the most peaceful and safe places in Bosnia during the war.
Article comments
1 - Dr Dreadful
Synthesized memory, or confabulation, is a well-documented psychological phenomenon. We've all done it. We tell a story - true or made-up - about something that happened to us, it gets a reaction, so the next time we tell it we embellish it, and so on down the road, adding more and more details until time and distance make it hard to distinguish fact from fiction even to ourselves.
I have a very clear memory of playing 'doctor' at age 6 with a girl in my class which, for very good anatomical reasons which I won't go into but which you can probably guess at, cannot possibly be true.
The difference in Hillary's case, which she should have known, is that every public appearance she's made since, oh, probably at least 1991, is well-documented and easily checkable.
Perhaps she really believed that her 'memory' of the Tuzla trip was real. Whatever the truth of the matter, I would expect her to be more careful when making public statements about her past from now on.
2 - Clavos
You are absolutely and totally right about the experience of being the subject of hostile fire.
You never, ever forget it.
Ever.
And, unless you're a congenital liar, you won't "misspeak" about it, either.
3 - adaniel
Globalization has its fruits for democracy: had Mrs Clinton run in 1992 and misspoke similarly about a foreign venture into a country unknown to most of her electorate, maybe a few letters to the editors would have appeared but it would not have questioned her credibility. In 2008 you have a great chance that you have an eyewitness of any public event all over the world who can write in English and finds access to the internet. I have seen many comments in the blogosphere coming from Bosnia on this issue. I guess that the next American government as a global power will have to take into account the global public opinion more than every before. It may be better for the whole world.