I used to love Pinocchio when I was a kid...

Hillary Clinton yesterday acknowledged she "misspoke" about the level of danger she was exposed to on a 1996 visit to Bosnia, leading the campaign of her rival, Barack Obama, to accuse her of exaggerating her foreign policy experience.

The Democratic presidential hopeful, who made the trip while she was first lady, said last week she had come under sniper fire when landing at Tuzla airport.

"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," she said in a speech last Monday.

But an American comedian who accompanied her on the trip and a contemporaneous news account both contradicted her claims.

The comedian, Sinbad, recently told the Washington Post he had felt no sense of danger.

"I think the only 'red-phone' moment was: 'Do we eat here or at the next place?'" he said. "I never felt I was in a dangerous position."

The Associated Press reported at the time that Clinton "took no extraordinary risks on the trip" and did not mention gunfire.

Clinton yesterday acknowledged to the Philadelphia Daily News that there was what she called a "minor blip" in her account of the visit.

"I went to 80 countries, you know," she told the paper's editorial board. "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."