(Controversial Times) The photo below has been causing trouble for Hillary Clinton for over a decade now. Since her campaign is ramping up for the Democratic Presidential nomination, it’s surfacing again.
In the photo, an unidentified soldier flashes the sign of coercion, taught to military graduates of survival school, as he poses with then Senator Hillary Clinton. The sign is meant to convey a forced situation, or distress, implying that the soldier did not actually want to take the photo.
Before you head to the net to vet this story, everyone’s favorite online debunking site, Snopes, has already done it. According to their analysis they find that the story is TRUE:
The implication of the photograph shown above (which began circulating on the Internet in early 2004 and was taken at one of the military facilities New York senator Hillary Clinton visited in Iraq during the Thanksgiving 2003 holidays), then, is that despite the smiling faces and friendly hand-shaking captured in the picture, the soldier is communicating that he is not really all that pleased to be meeting Senator Clinton.
The “not really all that pleased” assessment is evidently accurate — although the picture originally appeared without any accompanying text, and the “coercion” caption was only added later to make the humor of the photograph more explicit — as the soldier pictured with Senator Clinton (who asked that we not identify him by name) told us that he employed the gesture to indicate that he was not a fan of the senator’s and was not as appreciative of having the opportunity to meet (and pose with) her as it might otherwise appear.
