Judy Miller “retires” from the NYT

UPDATE: Judy, Judy, Judy, looking for hits already! Here’s Judy Miller’s "Farewell Letter" and embedded within it is a link to her website, all stocked and ready to go with rebuttals to everyone who’s been mean to her lately.

Judith Miller retires from New York Times

E & P has more details:

Under the terms of the separation, Miller will write a farewell letter to the editor, to be published in Thursday’s paper. Another condition of the split required Keller to share a letter with the paper’s staff clarifying his controversial remarks about her “entanglement” with I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the former White House official indicted in the CIA leak investigation.

“In her 28 years at The Times, Judy participated in some great, prize-winning journalism,” Keller wrote to the staff. “She displayed fierce determination and personal courage both in pursuit of the news and in resisting assaults on the freedom of news organizations to report. We wish her well in the next phase of her career.”

Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., said in a statement, “We are grateful to Judy for her significant personal sacrifice to defend an important journalistic principle. I respect her decision to retire from The Times and wish her well.”

Miller’s lawyers and the paper had been negotiating a severance package for the last two weeks, although they had declined to discuss specific terms of the deal. An article posted on the Times’ Web site Wednesday afternoon outlined the broad terms: “Under the agreement, Ms. Miller will retire from the newspaper, and The Times will print a letter she wrote to the editor explaining her position,” wrote Katharine Q. Seelye. “Ms. Miller originally demanded that she be able to write an essay for the paper’s Op-Ed page refuting the allegations against her, the lawyers said. The Times refused that demand — Gail Collins, editor of the editorial page, said, ‘We don’t use the Op-Ed page for back and forth between one part of the paper and another’ — but agreed to let her to write the letter.”

More here.