Washington - Hillary Clinton continued to take fire Tuesday over her exaggerated portrayal of the danger of a visit she made to Bosnia in March 1996. Meanwhile, she took a swipe at Barack Obama, the Democratic candidate who narrowly leads her in the bid for the party's presidential nomination, and his controversial pastor.
Clinton admitted Tuesday to making a mistake when she was trying to convince an audience of her expertise in foreign affairs with the following remark last week: "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."
In fact, there was no sniper fire, and Clinton was received at the airport by a smiling young girl carrying flowers. Those images emerged from video footage resurrected by reporters who remembered covering her trip as first lady during the presidency of her husband, Bill Clinton.
In the footage, Clinton walks casually with her then-teenage daughter Chelsea, waving to the greeting committee.
The Washington Post has given Clinton several Pinocchio points - barbs awarded for candidates when they stretch the truth - for her comments.
Clinton backpedalled Tuesday, saying that she had "made a mistake in describing it."
"We were ... very much told by the Secret Service and the military that we were going into a war zone and that we had to be conscious of that," Clinton told an audience. "I was the first first lady taken into a war zone since Eleanor Roosevelt (during World War II)."
Neither Obama, who is on holiday in the US Virgin Islands, nor his campaign staff have commented on Clinton's controversy.
That hasn't kept Clinton from taking a jab Tuesday at Obama over an issue that has occupied cable TV broadcasters nonstop for days - the long record of fiery anti-white and anti-Hillary remarks from the pulpit by Obama's retired Chicago pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.
While Clinton's campaign mostly stayed clear of the explosive issue last week, the senator on Tuesday, when asked what she would have done in such a case, said she would have left the church.
"Given all we have heard and seen, he would not have been my pastor," Clinton said. "While we, of course, must protect our right to freedom of expression, it should not be used as a license or an excuse to demean and humiliate our fellow citizens."
In a major speech last week on race relations, Obama defended the pastor, saying he could no more disown Wright, who has been his spiritual mentor for 20 years, than he could his own white grandmother, who has also made racist remarks that made him cringe.
Clinton aimed a last jab at Obama's argument, saying: "You know, we don't have a choice when it comes to our relatives. We have a choice when it comes to our pastors and the churches we attend."
Clinton and Obama next face off on April 22 in Pennsylvania, the most populous remaining state holding intra-party voting before the centre-left Democrats meet in August for their nominating convention in Denver, Colorado.
Republican John McCain has already sewn up his party's nomination.
