White House papers fail to back Clinton's claims of experience in foreign policy

The Daily Telegraph (LONDON)
By Toby Harnden

HILLARY CLINTON'S boasts that she gained major foreign policy experience as First Lady were undermined yesterday when 11,046 pages of her White House schedules provided scant evidence to back up her claims.

The documents were made public by the US national archives after pressure from Barack Obama, her rival for the Democrat presidential nomination, and freedom-of-information groups.But many details were edited at the request of lawyers acting for her husband, Bill, the former president, citing privacy and national security concerns.

But details of her visits to Northern Ireland indicated that she went little beyond the traditional role of a president's wife, attending social events, meeting women's groups and greeting children.

While her husband was in the White House, she accompanied him to the province three times and made two visits on her own. During the first trip in November 1995 the only separate items on her schedule were a visit to a women's drop-in centre and two business parks.

Her visit in September 1998 with the president was overshadowed by the Monica Lewinsky scandal. But Mrs Clinton was by her husband's side as he visited Omagh, the scene of a Real IRA atrocity that had killed 29 people the previous month.

Her schedule records that she and Cherie Blair, the then prime minister's wife, were to "proceed to the children's play area, where children are creating playground models''.

Mrs Clinton and Mrs Blair then visited the Royal Victoria Hospital, in Belfast, to talk to emergency workers and some of those injured by the bomb blast before joining their husbands in Omagh.

Mrs Clinton did visit the Stormont parliament buildings for an hour and 10 minutes. But her meeting with David Trimble, Northern Ireland First Minister, and his deputy Seamus Mallon, was limited to a five-minute "courtesy call'' before 40 minutes in which "the First Lady mixes and mingles with the women assembly members''.

Mrs Clinton's visits to Bosnia in 1996 and Macedonia in 1999, which she has also cited as substantive foreign policy trips, shed little more light.

She later toured a motor pool and had lunch with soldiers at a mess hall before an hour-long "show for troops'' in which she made remarks after brief performances from Sinbad, a comedian, and Sheryl Crow, the singer.