By now Hillary's Bosnia blip is old news well-known, and already the incident is held as a reaffirmation of the long-running narrative of her dishonesty. Diary after diary has castigated her for lying, and conjecture abounds that this will, or ought to, sink her candidacy.
Hillary responded with an admission that she "misspoke", to which the general population around these parts has said, essentially, BS. In a nutshell, the prevailing view is that Hillary didn't misspeak at all, but rather intentionally fabricated the details of the Bosnia visit in order to beef up her foreign policy credentials.
The trouble with this view, and with the shrill caterwauling about how dishonest Hillary is for having lied, is that it's not entirely accurate.
To recap briefly, the controversy revolves around the following statement about her trip to Bosnia in 1996:
I certainly do remember that trip to Bosnia... we came in in an evasive maneuver... I remember landing under sniper fire... there was no greeting ceremony... we ran with our heads down, we basically were told to run to our cars... there was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, we basically were told to run to our cars, that is what happened.
But of course, that wasn't what happened. The truth, so far as the video is concerned, is far less compelling, and Clinton's story turns out to be a dramatization. Thus, her subsequent admission of having "misspoken".
Being fairly interested in neurological phenomena, I am not entirely satisfied with the characterization prevalent here, which is essentially that Clinton is a liar. The implication is that Clinton and her advisors willfully fabricated the story in an intentional bid to "sex up" the Bosnia story and hype her foreign credentials. While this certainly fits the narrative of evil opportunism that many here have been writing for her, evidence be damned, it dismisses a plausible alternative explanation.
I must say here that I am not excusing the flap. There is compelling video evidence that the Bosnia landing was not as she said it was, and she is rightly being criticized for it; if a candidate is going to say in a public speech that something happened a certain way, it would be advisable to double check the details. I am specifically contesting the accusations leveled at her that she was willfully lying about the Bosnia affair.
I don't really see this as the lie others do. In fact, it seems far more plausible to me that this is, in fact, less an honesty lapse than a memory lapse.
Chris at Mixing Memory is a cognitive researcher, and wrote a post about this very issue, and I tend to agree with him. He calls it a source monitoring failure, while I would lean toward calling it a confabulation, but either way you slice it, a careful consideration of the facts leads me to believe that Hillary honestly believed her account of the landing.
What happens, essentially, is that in creating a memory of an event, your brain doesn't just faithfully record the facts. Often, memories are formed from a chaotic mess of prejudices, context, and contemporaneous events. So Hillary's memory of Bosnia was informed not only by the event itself, but also by the surrounding information and preparations for the trip. According to Lisa Muscatine (whose quote I took from the same source as Chris):
I was on the plane with then First Lady Hillary Clinton for the trip from Germany into Bosnia in 1996. We were put on a C17-- a plane capable of steep ascents and descents -- precisely because we were flying into what was considered a combat zone. We were issued flak jackets for the final leg because of possible sniper fire near Tuzla. As an additional precaution, the First Lady and Chelsea were moved to the armored cockpit for the descent into Tuzla. We were told that a welcoming ceremony on the tarmac might be canceled because of sniper fire in the hills surrounding the air strip. From Tuzla, Hillary flew to two outposts in Bosnia with gunships escorting her helicopter.
Too see what might have happened, well, I'll let Chris take it from here:
Let's look at what might have happened. In Germany, Clinton got on a plane that was used specifically because of its ability to maneuver during landings to avoid incoming fire. Undoubtedly, they were told that this was the reason for using the plane. They had flak jackets and Clinton was put into the armored cockpit for the descent, again as a precaution against incoming fire. Add to this the fact that there were credible threats, meaning she was probably rather anxious, and we all know that stress doesn't make for better overall memory, even if it makes us remember perceptual details better. Hell, maybe even Clinton and her entourage were rushed, after the meeting on the tarmac, to their cars because they were on a tight schedule (not because of the threats), and you get a situation that's easily distorted by the reconstructive processes of memory into something like the version that Clinton told. In fact, I'd bet that they even told Clinton or someone on her team that in the case of incoming fire, they would have to be rush to their cars with their heads down, instead of having the scheduled ceremony on the tarmac. All this could easily add up to a memory in which the threat, the fear, the flak jackets, etc., add up to a difficulty in remembering what actually happened and what she was afraid might happened. And the fact that Clinton seems to remember it so vividly, contrary to being evidence that she's lying, is likely just a product of her brain filling in the gaps and building a coherent representation of the episode, just like it's supposed to do.
If you read Chris' post, he goes into more detail than I will here about how Lisa's account and others support the contention that this is an honest case of misremembering due to confabulation/source monitoring failure. The salient point, however, is that to suggest she's actively lying is not a fair assessment here, and overlooks the fact that, say what you will about the woman, she's nevertheless intelligent enough to know that such a misstatement is easily verified.
None of which excuses her inaccuracy or her campaign's failure to fact-check, mind you. But still... let's at least be civil and reasonable in our assessment of facts.