Who is Amorita Randall?

I can't seem to find much press about another screw up at the Times. The fact that the huge and widely dispersed article they published, "The Woman's War", featured an account of a humvee attack in Iraq recounted by Naval construction worker named Amorita Randall that was never fully checked out before the magazine went to press. Her story was used amidst a series of accounts meant to elucidate the role that sexual harassment in the military contributes to PTSD in female troops.

In the article it states: Amorita Randall lives across the state from Christensen, in a small town outside of Grand Junction. She is 27, a former naval construction worker who served in Iraq in 2004. Over the course of several phone conversations before visiting her in January, I grew accustomed to the way Randall coexisted with her memories. Mostly she inched up to them.

On days she was feeling stable, she would want to talk, calling me up and abruptly jumping into stories about her six years in the Navy, describing how she was raped twice - the second rape supposedly taking place just a matter of weeks before she arrived in Iraq. Her experience in Iraq, she said, included one notable combat incident, in which her Humvee was hit by an I.E.D., killing the soldier who was driving and leaving her with a brain injury. "I don't remember all of it," she told me when I met her in the sparsely furnished apartment she shares with her fiance?. "I don't know if I passed out or what, but it was pretty gruesome."

The reason Randall doesn't "remember all of it" is because it never happened. She was never deployed to Iraq.

The Times Magazine fact-checkers didn't contact the Navy to verify Randall's story until three days before deadline, according to the editors' note. Hours before press time, a Navy spokesman denied Randall's account to the Times Magazine, the note states. Randall still stood by her account, and the Times Magazine sent it off to press with a passage containing the Navy contradiction: "No after-action report exists to back up Randall's claims of combat exposure or injury. A Navy spokesman reports that her commander says that his unit was never involved in combat during her tour.

Three days after the piece went to press, reports the editors' note, the Navy provided the conclusive evidence that Randall had lied. Only part of Randall's unit was sent to Iraq, leaving her behind.

Naturally, the NYT willingly went along with it, not bothering with facts at all. Nope...no liberal media bias there. It's not like the NYT feels any compunction to saddle their articles with any sort of requirement of truth. What's important to them is the message and not the truth. The message seems to be: Bash the military.

I don't know about you, but to me the truth of what actually happened is more important than the way someone remembers it...

Another embarrassment for the anti-war fable enablers at the NYT.