Before Corporal Jeffrey B. Starr was killed in Iraq, he left a note on his laptop to be read by loved ones in the event of his death. Last week, The New York Times found itself embroiled in controversy after the paper was caught selectively editing Starr’s letter to remove any mention of his support for the war effort. Now, Starr’s surviving girlfriend Emmylyn Anonical is blasting the paper, saying that she was “upset about what they took out of that letter”:

In her first public comments since the letter scandal erupted, Anonical told The [New York] Post that going public with the private letter was one of the hardest decisions of her life.

Seeing it used by the Times to misrepresent her boyfriend’s beliefs about the war stung deeply, she said.

“The reason I chose to share that letter was the paragraph about why he was doing this, not the part about him expecting to die. It hurt, it really hurt,” she said by phone from Seattle.

The fallen Marine’s family and conservative critics are now accusing the “paper of record” of inserting its anti-war stance into news pages.

Starr’s uncle, Timothy Lickness, told MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough that the family’s reaction to the Times and its editing “was not so much anger as it was disappointment.” Apparently, even before this incident, the Times was not held in high regard by the family. “[T]his being the story in the Times, I don’t think anybody is all that surprised,” Lickness said. He’s now waiting to hear back from the paper:

We really are not a bitter family. We are not a family that holds grudges. We want to honor Jeffrey, and so we wanted the rest of his story to be told. I did write to the Times, and I asked them, I thought very politely, if they would run the rest of the story. I did not get a reply.

Meanwhile, in the context of a hard-to-locate correction from Times columnist Nick Kristof, Mickey Kaus discovers another possible explanation for the paper’s decision to hide some content behind the $50-a-year firewall known as TimesSelect. It turns out that TimesSelect is the new dumping ground for corrections that the paper would rather not print:

Kristof may have hit on the marketing breakthrough that will save TimesSelect. Call it TruthSelect. Here’s the plan: Have the op-ed columns in the print edition contain flagrant inaccuracies. Figure out what the factual version of events is, but print the corrected, accurate version only on the restricted, premium portion of the Web site, where people have to pay $49.95 to get at it. The B.S. is free. The truth you have to pay for! It’s so simple and intuitive it’s genius.