Arianna Huffington on the Retirement of Judith Miller and Schwarzenegger’s Ballot Defeat

On Wednesday, the New York Times announced Miller would be leaving the paper after a controversial 28-year career. Miller said it was in part because “I have become the news.”

For years, Judith Miller has been one of the most controversial reporters at the New York Times. In the lead-up to the Iraq war, she wrote a series of stories claiming that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Her stories were often cited by the Bush administration in its efforts to sell the war against Iraq.

Judith Miller’s reporting was controversial, even within the New York Times newsroom. In 2003, the paper’s executive editor, Bill Keller, told Miller she could no longer cover Iraq and weapons of mass destruction. Miller made headlines this year when she went to jail for 85 days in order to protect a source in the CIA leak investigation. That source turned out to be Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the now-indicted former chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney.

For years, critics accused Miller of being too close to her high-placed sources, from Libby to Iraqi exile leader Ahmed Chalabi to top Pentagon officials. Last month, Miller revealed she had a Pentagon security clearance while embedded with US military teams hunting for banned weapons in Iraq. This would have allowed the Pentagon to show her classified information, but bar her from reporting on it.

Up until her resignation on Wednesday, tension had been growing at the Times over her future. Two weeks ago columnist Maureen Dowd described her as a “Woman of Mass Destruction.”

* Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor of the website http://HuffingtonPost.com. She has written extensively about Miller on her website. She is a syndicated columnist and author of 10 books including "Fanatics and Fools: The Game Plan for Winning Back America." In 2003 she ran for governor of California.

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