Judith Miller

Miller, 57, had been negotiating a severance deal with the paper for several weeks.

Miller spent 85 days in jail during the summer for refusing to testify about her conversations with a confidential source. But after her release, she was criticized publicly by Times editors and writers for her actions in the leak case and for her reporting during the runup to the Iraq war, later discredited, indicating that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.

"I have chosen to resign because over the last few months, I have become the news, something a New York Times reporter never wants to be," Miller wrote in the letter.

Miller joined the Times in 1977 and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for reporting on global terrorism.

The paper had initially been publicly supportive of Miller, and waged a long and costly legal battle on her behalf after she refused to tell a grand jury about conversations she had with I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, then chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, about CIA operative Valerie Plame. Plame is the wife of a Bush administration critic, Joseph Wilson.

The Japan Times Weekly: Nov. 19, 2005
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