Hillary Plagiarized From Snowe's Bosnia Trip?

The Washington Post is reporting that the scary airport sniping experience at the Balkan airport did actually happen to a DC lawmaker, but it was Sen. Olympia Snowe and 6 other senators on a fact-finding mission, not Hillary Clinton.

According to the WP, this Snowe trip happened in October 1995, 6 months before Clinton visited Tuzla in her very peaceful mission in March 1996. The Snowe delegation was on a "fact-finding mission through war-torn Sarajevo, just before the Dayton accords resulted in a U.S. military presence on the ground in Bosnia."

So, Hillary was partially accurate:  A female senator did travel to Bosnia around the same time, but just with a different name.

A news report from October 20, 1995 reported part of Snowe's account of her Bosnia trip, which is very similar to Hillary's account of at least sniper activity happening in the area, and the need to dash from the plane to an armored vehicle for safety:

"It's really sad. People are basically just living there and trying to survive," the Maine Republican said. "They're constantly living under threat of shelling or sniper fire." . . . As the plane landed she took note of the fortified bunkers surrounding Sarajevo's airport. . . . She glanced at the wall of firetrucks lined up along the airport tarmac, acting as shields from any Serb gunman looking to make a name for himself. She dashed across the runway to an armored vehicle waiting to whisk the senators to the city center. She glared at the hollowed-out remains of buildings along the city's main highway, better known as "Sniper Alley."

However, by the time Clinton visited in March 1996, Bosnia may have been considered a "potential war zone," but there were "no open hostilities," and not the constant threat of "shelling or sniper fire."

Bosnia was in fact a relatively safe place for Clinton to visit:

NATO troops were patrolling the area in force, engaged in tasks such as clearing mines and blowing up old ammunition dumps. According to Adrian Pandurevic of Associated Press TV, "there were no armed groups roaming Bosnia, or any significant threat," and "the former front lines had been bulldozed." He described claims of "sniper fire" in and around the Tuzla air base as "simply ridiculous." Rick Atkinson, a longtime military correspondent for The Washington Post, was also in the Tuzla region around the time of Clinton's visit, reporting on the activities of the 1st Armored Division. He remembers hiring a rental car and roaming by himself over back roads between the air base and the city. He said in an e-mail that "the only danger was from mines, and those had all been removed from the air base area," and from plane crashes caused by bad weather conditions, of the kind that killed Commerce Secretary Ronald Brown and 34 others near Dubrovnik, Croatia, in April 1996.

This is probably my shortest diary ever, but it was too funny to pass up. I don't even know what to call this type of "mistake." Plagiarism usually applies to stealing another's writings, words, or ideas. What do you call it when Hillary borrows parts of someone else's life?

UPDATE:  Confirmation from a statement Snowe made in 1996.  

In 1996, "[i]n a recent survey conducted by USIA Staff Writer Dian McDonald, the legislators were asked to assess the importance of foreign policy issues to their constituents and to cite which foreign policy issues are important to them and why. Here is how they responded."

This is how Snowe responded:

My congressional responsibilities took me to Bosnia and Croatia last fall as part of a special Senate delegation that landed amidst shelling in Sarajevo... .

Snowe references last fall, which would have been 1995, the date reported in the WP.