Murray S. Waas

Following the presidency of George Herbert Walker Bush, in 1993, while a reporter for the The Los Angeles Times, Murray Waas, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in the category of national reporting for his stories detailing that administration's prewar foreign policy towards the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein. That same year, Murray Waas won the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, awarded by the Joan Shorenstein Center on The Press, of the John F. Kennedy School of Government of Harvard University, for "a series that detailed United States policy toward Iraq before the Persian Gulf war.

Summarizing the stories that Waas wrote for National Journal during 2005 and 2006 about the second Bush administration's policies that led up to war with Iraq, Washington Post online White House columnist Dan Froomkin, wrote on March 31, 2006:

Slowly but surely, investigative reporter Murray Waas has been putting together a compelling narrative about how President Bush and his top aides contrived their bogus case for war in Iraq; and how they succeeded in keeping charges of deception from becoming a major issue in the 2004 election.