By: E&P Staff As part of her severance deal in leaving The New York Times today, Judith Miller has written a letter that will be published in the Thursday paper. The Times revealed today that Miller wanted placement on the op-ed page, which the paper refused, so it will appear in letter form, under the heading, "Judith Miller's Farewell."
In the letter, Miller writes that she has "chosen to resign because over the last few months, I have become the news, something a New York Times reporter never wants to be."
But she also reveals that also a factor is that some of her colleagues disagreed with her decision to testify in the C.I.A. leak case (after spending nearly three months in jail). "Though some colleagues disagreed with my decision to testify, for me to have stayed in jail after achieving my conditions would have seemed self-aggrandizing martyrdom or worse, a deliberate effort to obstruct the prosecutor's inquiry into serious crimes," she writes, according to the Times today.
Referring to her flawed reporting on WMD in Iraq, she observes she had "become a lightning rod for public fury over the intelligence failures that helped lead our country to war." She says she regrets "that I was not permitted to pursue answers" to questions about those intelligence failures.
She says she is gratified that Executive Editor Bill Keller "has finally clarified remarks made by him that were unsupported by fact and personally distressing....Some of his comments suggested insubordination on my part. I have always written the articles assigned to me, adhered to the paper's sourcing and ethical guidelines and cooperated with editorial decisions, even those with which I disagreed."
She also thanks "colleagues who stood by me after I was criticized on these pages."
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