James Stephen Traub

James Stephen Straub is a doctoral candidate in American history writing about how the second Bush administration took the U.S. to war with Iraq.

t has been 10 long years since "Shock and Awe" – the opening bombardment of Baghdad – lit up the skies above the Tigris. A decade later, we know far more about the case the Bush administration made to the world to justify its war of choice to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Books like Hubris by David Corn and Michael Isikoff, and British commission and US Senate reports have catalogued the extent to which intelligence was misused to mislead the public.

Murray Waas of National Journal is proving himself the best muckraker in Washington: Take Waas' lastest big story, which documented the Bush administration's high-level machinations to cover up what Bush knew, and when Bush knew it, about Iraq's (lack of) WMD programs:

"Presidential knowledge was the ball game," says a former senior government official outside the White House who was personally familiar with the damage-control effort. "The mission was to insulate the president. You could do that on Niger. You couldn't do that with the aluminum tubes," Murray Waas wrote in National Journal.