A story published by The New York Times on Sunday to clarify its coverage of the Valerie Plame leak case has instead raised a series of new questions and complaints about the newspaper's veteran reporter Judith Miller and her supervisors in the long-running controversy.

Critics inside the paper and in the wider journalism community said yesterday that they found particularly disturbing revelations that the newspaper's editors seemed unable to control Miller and that the reporter agreed to use a misleading identification to shield the identity of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff.

The rare degree of autonomy she seemed to have once prompted her to jokingly call herself "Miss Run Amok," the Times article said, and some of her colleagues refused to work with her.

Some of the critics were particularly harsh because Miller's work has been questioned before.

Her editors had pulled her off coverage of Iraq and weapons issues in 2003 and later ran an unusual editor's note saying it could no longer stand by six stories about weapons of mass destruction, including five that Miller, 57, wrote or co-wrote.

"I don't know why she was allowed to do all these things and where the people were who were supposed to manage her," said one Times reporter, who asked not to be named out of concern of antagonizing the paper's editors.

Rem Rieder, editor of the American Journalism Review, was even more pointed in a criticism published yesterday in the trade publication's online edition.

"Most disturbing is the sense that The Times at times is a ship without a skipper or, better yet, an asylum run by the inmates," Rieder wrote. "Strong leadership and editorial oversight seem hard to come by."

Greg Mitchell, the editor of the journalism trade publication Editor & Publisher, wrote in an online column: "It's not enough that Judith Miller ... is taking some time off and 'hopes' to return to the New York Times newsroom. She should be promptly dismissed for crimes against journalism, and her own newspaper."

The reactions followed The Times' Sunday story and an accompanying first-person account by Miller about her four hours of testimony before a federal grand jury.

The panel, directed by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, is expected to decide by Oct. 28 whether Libby or any other official will be indicted for revealing the identity of Plame, a covert CIA operative unveiled in apparent retaliation for her husband's attacks on the Bush administration's Iraq policies.

Material from The Associated Press is included in this report