New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, under fire for what she admits were misstatements about a 1996 trip she made to Bosnia, yesterday criticized her Democratic presidential rival, Illinois Sen Barack Obama, over how he had reacted to controversial sermons made by his former pastor.

"Given all we have heard and seen, he would not have been my pastor," Mrs. Clinton told reporters in Greensburg. "We don't have a choice when it comes to our relatives -- we have a choice when it comes to our pastors and the churches we choose to attend," she said.

Last Tuesday, Mr. Obama tried to put to rest the controversy over remarks made by his church's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, in a speech that both repudiated and showed compassion for the minister, and that also addressed the difficult issue of the nation's racial divisions.

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Videos showing Mr. Wright blaming the United States for the 9/11 attacks and claiming that the government had a role in spreading the AIDS virus in black communities have circulated widely online and on television in recent weeks, hurting the Obama campaign.

Mrs. Clinton's reaction to Mr. Wright's comments came as her campaign continued to respond to a fuss over her recent accounts of a Bosnia visit while first lady, in which she had asserted that a welcoming ceremony there was curtailed because of the threat of sniper fire. Videotape of her arrival, along with accounts by others on the trip, refuted her characterization.

"I made a mistake in describing it," Mrs. Clinton told reporters yesterday. "We were very much told by the Secret Service and the military that we were going into a war zone, and we had to be conscious of that. I was the first first lady taken into a war zone since Eleanor Roosevelt. And you know, I think the military and the Secret Service did a terrific job."

The Obama campaign saw calculation in Mrs. Clinton's remarks about both Bosnia and Mr. Wright.

"After originally refusing to play politics with this issue, it's disappointing to see Hillary Clinton's campaign sink to this low in a transparent effort to distract attention away from the story she made up about dodging sniper fire in Bosnia," Obama spokesman Bill Burton said in a statement.

"The truth is, Barack Obama has already spoken out against his pastor's offensive comments and addressed the issue of race in America with a deeply personal and uncommonly honest speech. The American people deserve better than tired political games that do nothing to solve the larger challenges facing this country," he said.

Clinton campaign spokesman Mark Nevens retorted: "Senator Clinton was asked a question about what she would do if Reverend Wright was her pastor, and she answered it based on her personal views. Considering that the Obama campaign started peddling a photograph of President Clinton with Reverend Wright less than 48 hours after Senator Obama gave a speech calling for a high-minded discussion on the issue of race, this latest attack that they've launched is disengenuous."

Mrs. Clinton's decision to speak more extensively about the Wright controversy represented an apparent shift in her campaign's approach to the sensitive issue. In a Philadelphia news conference last week, after Mr. Obama's speech, she repeatedly declined to answer questions about the matter, beyond observing that it was a good thing that her rival had made his speech.

In frequent media conference calls in recent days, Mrs. Clinton's aides have consistently avoided commenting about Mr. Obama's ties to his former pastor.

Yesterday's exchanges came as the Obama campaign has sought to put Mrs. Clinton on the defensive regarding the Bosnia misstatements, as well as over their demands that she release a variety of personal financial records.

The Obama campaign released six years of his tax returns yesterday, after weeks of pressing Mrs. Clinton to do the same. She has promised to release her IRS information "on or about'' the April 15 tax deadline and, in any case, before Pennsylvania's April 22 primary.

At her public appearance, Mrs. Clinton spent a second day of a campaign swing through southwestern Pennsylvania talking about pocketbook issues -- this time on the importance of retirement savings for Pennsylvania's large senior population. A day after a major speech about the subprime loan and credit crises, she told 1,000 people gathered at the Pitt-Greensburg gym of her plans, announced last fall, for "American Retirement Accounts" that would provide government matches for money socked away by middle-income families.

In an hourlong session, she also repeated her pledge not to privatize Social Security, which elicited a standing ovation from the crowd. A second standing ovation came amid a discussion of soaring energy prices, when she took a shot at the close ties between the Bush family and Saud royal family in Saudi Arabia. "If I'm your president, you'll not see me holding hands with the Saudis; you'll see me holding them accountable," she said.

Overall, it was an odd day for the New York senator, who has been welcomed by big crowds and favorable polls in Pennsylvania, even while trailing Mr. Obama in delegate and popular-vote totals nationwide for the Democratic nomination.

The oddity kicked off when Mrs. Clinton visited the offices of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, owned by arch-conservative Republican financier Richard Mellon Scaife, even though he was one of the central figures in the "vast right-wing conspiracy" Mrs. Clinton once denounced, and had funded numerous attempts to tie Mrs. Clinton and her husband to any number of misdeeds.

"I said in the beginning when I arrived [at the Tribune-Review] that it was obviously somewhat counterintuitive for me to be there," she said.