Biden has his own Brian Williams moment

During a CNN/YouTube Democratic debate in June of that year, Biden said he was “shot at” inside the Green Zone in Iraq then later walked back the comment to say that a mortar round landed roughly a few hundred yards away from a structure where he was staying overnight.

The Green Zone in Baghdad is a heavily fortified 10-square-mile area that houses Iraqi government offices, the U.S. embassy, and military headquarters that once were located in Saddam Hussein’s Republican Palace.

Biden, whose gaffes and garrulous ways have become legendary through more than four decades in politics, was in the middle of making a point about how difficult it would be to redeploy U.S. troops out of Iraq if a president decided to withdraw in six months.

He slipped in the mention of being “shot at” as an aside, a seeming attempt to underscore his credibility on the topic.

“Let’s start telling the truth,” he said during the debate. “Number one, you take all the troops out — you better have helicopters ready to take those 3,000 civilians inside the Green Zone, where I have been seven times and shot at. You better make sure you have protection for them, or let them die, number one.”

Biden’s claim of being “shot at” attracted little attention at the time, although it raised questions among troops serving in the Green Zone during his visits. This reporter asked the then-senator about the experience and wrote up his revised account for an article in The Hill newspaper.

Random insurgent mortal shelling over the Green Zone walls was a common occurrence at the time, and those working inside would seek shelter only if the shelling picked up to a more dangerous level.

When asked for a detailed account of the experience, Biden described three incidents on two separate Iraq trips in which he felt that he was shot at or might have been shot at. Only one of them took place inside the Green Zone, he noted.

During that incident, he said a “shot” landed outside the building where he and other senators were staying, adding that the vehicle he was traveling in the day before might have been hit.

Biden said the incident happened in the morning while he and at least one other senator were shaving. Although he said it shook the building, he wasn’t rattled enough to duck and cover.

“No one got up and ran from the room — it wasn’t that kind of thing,” he said. “… It’s not like I had someone holding a gun to my head.”

Thinking about it after the fact, he said, a more accurate comment would have been: “I was near where a shot landed.”

Biden’s vice presidential press office declined to comment Friday.

Back in 2007, Biden’s Senate aides provided more details of the three incidents in an e-mailed account: In December 2005, Biden and his staff spent the night in the Green Zone. At about 6:30 a.m., they heard mortars fired a few hundred yards away, which shook the aides’ trailer and rattled the building where Biden was getting ready for the day.

“A soldier came by to explain what happened and said if the mortar fire continued, they would need to proceed to a shelter,” according to the aides.

During the same December 2005 trip, a bullet narrowly missed the helicopter that Biden and his aides were flying in en route to the Baghdad airport from the Green Zone.

But the most harrowing episode, according to an aide present, took place in December 2004, while Biden was leaving Iraq in a C-130 cargo airplane. The plane’s anti-missile system was triggered, indicating that they had been fired upon by a surface-to-air missile.

“When mortars are fired into the Green Zone or surface-to-air missiles are fired at a plane, they don’t have names or addresses on them,” Biden spokeswoman Elizabeth Alexander wrote in an email in 2007. “The nuance of being shot at or shot near means nothing in a war zone. The point Sen. Biden was making is that Iraq is a dangerous place — for our troops, for Iraqis, for everyone.”

During two subsequent visits as vice president in 2009 and 2010, mortar rounds harmlessly struck inside the Green Zone late at night but no damage or injuries were reported, according to a report in CNN.

Asked in 2007 about Biden’s differing versions of the experience, Patrick Campbell, legislative director for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, said Biden should be careful about how he describes his experiences, especially when making political points.

“Veterans don’t like it when people mischaracterize their service, people who overstate what happens to them,” he said. “We have names for them.”

Campbell also said the word “shot at” implies that “someone with an AK-47 pops up and is taking shots at you.” He thought Biden was more likely referring to mortars or rockets that insurgents periodically launch into the Green Zone but are more random in nature, as his aides later described.

Although Biden is known for making off-the-cuff comments that stretch the truth from time to time, he was not alone in fabricating dramatic war-zone accounts during the 2008 presidential race.

In March 2008, Hillary Clinton falsely claimed during a foreign policy speech about Iraq that she had come under sniper fire in Bosnia in the 1990s.

“I remember landing under sniper fire,” Clinton said of the incident that she claimed occurred when she was first lady and was making a visit to the war-stricken country. “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.

Later a video surfaced of Clinton’s arrival in Bosnia that day showing her stepping off the plane in seeming serenity. She is seen calmly smiling, shaking hands and accepting flowers.

Clinton later said she “misspoke” because of “sleep deprivation.” She chalked up the original false account to proof that “I’m human.”

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus this week used the escalating media controversy over Williams’ wartime lying to ask whether Clinton is laying low because of her own false statements about coming under fire in Bosnia.

“After hearing about Brian Williams’s recent suspension at NBC for telling false stories about coming under fire in war zones, we thought perhaps the [Democratic National Committee] had also ‘suspended’ Mrs. Clinton for her similar fabrications,” Priebus wrote in a letter to DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Like Williams’ war stories, Biden’s and Clinton’s combat accounts appear to be attempts to add drama and authority to their experiences.

Many other politicians have embellished their military experience while campaigning for office.

In 2011, the New York Times reported that Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., falsely stated that he had served in Vietnam when in reality he obtained several military deferments from 1965 to 1970 that enabled him to avoid going to war.

Blumenthal later said he had misspoken during one speech in March 2008 but stressed that in subsequent speeches he made it clear that he never served in Vietnam.

In reality, Blumenthal voluntarily joined the Marine Corps Reserves in 1970 and served for six months in Parris Island, S.C. and six years in the reserves.

The Army service of Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., has also come under scrutiny over the years, particularly when he ran for U.S. Senate in 1998.

Back then, the San Francisco Examiner raised questions about Issa’s claim that he served with an elite Army bomb unit, traveling with then-President Richard Nixon to protect him.

Issa also told a journalist that he attended Major League Baseball’s Word Series in 1971 as part of Nixon’s security entourage. But records the Examiner reviewed from the Nixon Presidential Library indicate that the president didn’t attend the World Series that year.

The San Francisco Examiner interviewed former soldiers who served with Issa, and military records also cast doubt on whether Issa served on presidential security duty. His “Army security team” experience amounted to less than six months on a bomb-disposal squad in 1971 — not enough experience to qualify him for presidential security duty, the newspaper asserted.

Former Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, made headlines for embellishing his flying experience in Vietnam. During his campaign for Senate in 1984 and while running for the presidential nomination in 1992, he claimed to have flown combat missions over North Vietnam.

In 1979 during a roundtable discussion with other military veterans, Harkin specifically said he flew combat missions in Vietnam.

“One year was in Vietnam,” he said. “I was flying F-4s and F-8s on combat air patrols and photo-reconnaissance support missions.”

When he was questioned about the account, he corrected the record, saying that he had been stationed in Japan and sometimes flew recently-repaired aircraft on test missions over Vietnam.

Harkin did fly F-4s and F-8s, but only later, when he was stationed at U.S. Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Blumenthal’s and Issa’s offices did not immediately respond to a request for comment. An inquiry left at the Harkin Institute for Public Policy and Citizen Engagement also was not returned.