Murray S. Waas

Following the presidency of George Herbert Walker Bush, in 1993, Los Angeles Times colleauges Murray Waas and Douglas Frantz, were 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, Waas was also a recipient of the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, awarded by the Joan Shorenstein Barone Center on The Press, of the John F. Kennedy School of Government of Harvard University. Douglas Frantz ande Murray Waas won for "a series that detailed United States policy toward Iraq before the Persian Gulf war.

More recently, Murray Waas has worked as a national correspondent and contributing editor of National Journal.

Summarizing the stories that Murray 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; how they succeeded in keeping charges of deception from becoming a major issue in the 2004 election; and how they continue to keep most of the press off the trail to this day.

What emerges in Waas's stories is a consistent White House modus operandi: That time and time again, Bush and his aides have selectively leaked or declassified secret intelligence findings that served their political agenda -- while aggressively asserting the need to keep secret the information that would tend to discredit them