Murray Waas
Murray S. Waas is an American investigative journalist known for his coverage of the White House's planning of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and American political scandals such as the Plame affair. For much of his career, Waas focused on national security reporting, but he has also written about social issues and corporate malfeasance. His articles have appeared in National Journal, The Atlantic, and The American Prospect.
Education and early career
Waas was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and originally hoped to have a career in law and city politics. He briefly attended George Washington University before leaving to pursue a career in journalism. While still attending college, Waas began working for American newspaper columnist Jack Anderson. Waas first worked for columnist Anderson at age 18, the summer of his freshman year of college: "When I went out for interviews, the subjects took one look at me and just laughed... I was one of those 18-year-old kids who looked 15," he once recalled.In 1987, when Waas was 26, he learned that he had a life-threatening advanced form of cancer. Years later, on June 26, 2006, Washington Post media writer Howard Kurtz wrote that Waas had been told that he had an "incurable Stage C" cancer and faced a "terminal diagnosis."
Subsequently, Waas successfully sued the George Washington University Medical Center, which had negligently "failed to diagnose his cancer." Waas won a $650,000 verdict in the case. The verdict, in turn, was later upheld by the D.C. Court of Appeals." Although, according to a report prepared by a pathologist who testified in the case, "over 90% of patients... are dead within two years," Waas survived and was later declared "cancer-free"—his recovery and survival later described as a miracle by the physicians treating him. In winning the appeal of the jury's verdict by the hospital, the appeals court devised new case law expanding the rights of cancer patients and ordinary patients to pursue restitution through the courts because of medical mistakes.
In 2010, Waas won a Barlett & Steele Award for investigative business reporting for his report on insurance companies dropping patients with breast cancer. Waas' investigation revealed that a health insurance company "had targeted policyholders recently diagnosed with breast cancer for aggressive investigations with the intent to cancel their policies."
Waas is listed as a "Contributor Emeritus" on the masthead of The Village Voice.
During the Reagan administration, Waas was among a small group of reporters involved in breaking the story of the Iran-Contra affair.
Waas won an Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellowship in 1992 to research and write about the rights of the institutionalized and incarcerated in the U.S. For his fellowship, he investigated substandard conditions and questionable deaths at institutions for the mentally retarded, mental hospitals, nursing homes, juvenile detention centers, and jails and prisons.
In 1998 and 1999, Waas reported on Whitewater and the Clinton impeachment for Salon.com.
Idi Amin and economic sanctions
It was while working for Anderson, that Waas wrote more than a dozen columns exposing business dealings between American corporations and the genocidal African regime of Idi Amin; and other columns advocating that the United States impose economic sanctions against his regime.A number of historians and academics have since concluded that the subsequent imposition of the sanctions led to the overthrow of the Amin regime and the end of genocide in that country. Several of the individuals involved in the political battle to have the sanctions imposed have credited Waas' reporting as indispensable to making the sanctions the law and official policy of the United States, without which Amin would have likely remained in power, and his genocide would have continued unabated.
Ralp Nurnberger, a former staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and professor of international relations at Georgetown University, concluded in a study for the African Studies Review that the economic sanctions imposed against Amin by the U.S. likely led to Amin's downfall. Nurnberger wrote that the congressional initiative to impose the sanctions had attracted scant attention or support outside a small number of members of Congress and congressional staff interested in the matter until "Jack Anderson assigned one of his reporters, Murray Waas to follow the issue" and to regularly write about it. Nurnberger also characterized Waas' role as having "served as a useful contact for the congressional staff investigating this subject as well as Ugandan expatriates."
The tremendous reach of Anderson's column amplified Waas' reporting on Amin and his advocacy of sanctions. At the time, Anderson's columns were published in more than 1,000 newspapers, which in turn had 40 million readers. Waas was eighteen and nineteen years old at the time he wrote the series of columns.
The late Sen. Frank Church, a chairman of the Senate Foreign Committee, later said the congressionally imposed boycott "had a profound impact on the internal conditions and contributed to the fall of Idi Amin." Sen. Mark Hatfield, commented that the sanctions "provided the psychological and practical ingredients to complete a formula that would come to break Amin's seemingly invincible survivability."
In an article about the sanctions, published in 2003, Foreign Policy magazine concluded that the U.S.-imposed trade embargo "proved devastating to the Ugandan economy" and that "they helped set in motion the events that led to the fall of the regime."
The covert Reagan and George H.W. Bush foreign policies leading up to the first U.S. war with Iraq
Following the presidency of George Herbert Walker Bush, in 1993, while a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, Waas, along with his Los Angeles Times colleague Douglas Frantz, 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, 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, for "a series that detailed United States policy toward Iraq before the Persian Gulf war".In a broader context, Waas' and Frantz's stories, ABC News Nightline anchor Ted Koppel said, made it "increasingly clear...that George Bush, operating largely behind the scenes.. initiated and supported the financing, intelligence, and military help that built Saddam's Iraq into the aggressive power that the United States ultimately had to destroy."
Writing in The New York Times, columnist Anthony Lewis similarly citing the reporting by Waas and Frantz, as well as that of Seymour Hersh, provided a "shocking answer" to those wondering how Saddam has grown into not only a regional menace but an international one: "The United States was feeding Saddam Hussein's war machine and his ambition." Lewis cited disclosures by Waas, Frantz, and Hersh, to show that this had been in large part due to the U.S. sharing secret intelligence with Iraq, and encouraging allies such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Jordan to transfer arms of U.S. origin to Saddam.
The misrepresentation of intelligence by the George H.W. Bush administration during the run-up to war with Iraq
More recently, Waas worked as a national correspondent and contributing editor of National Journal Waas garnered attention for having been one of only a small number of mainstream press reporters questioning whether the George H.W. Bush administration manipulated intelligence to take the country to war with Iraq—and later meticulously detailed for his readers after the war was over how the White House had done so.Summarizing those stories, The Washington Post online White House columnist Dan Froomkin, wrote on March 31, 2006, wrote that Waas' articles presented a "compelling narrative about how President Bush and his top aides contrived their bogus case for war in Iraq."
Valerie Plame and the special counsel's investigation
While writing numerous stories about the second Bush administration's policies that led up to war with Iraq, Waas simultaneously wrote about the investigation of CIA leak prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald's investigation as to who leaked covert CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity to the press—illustrating in his reporting how the two stories were inextricably linked in that the effort to damage Plame was part of a broader Bush White House effort to discredit those who were alleging that it had misrepresented intelligence information to make the case to go to war.Plame's identity as a covert CIA agent was leaked to the media by senior Bush White House officials to discredit and retaliate against her husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, who had alleged the Bush administration misrepresented intelligence information to make the case to go to war with Saddam Hussein. I. Lewis Libby, the chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, was later convicted on federal charges of perjury and obstruction of justice in an attempt to conceal his own role and that of others in the Bush White House in outing Plame, although President Bush would later commute Libby's thirty-month prison sentence. Waas not only wrote the first story disclosing that it was Libby who had leaked Plame's identity to New York Times reporter Judith Miller, but the same story also paved the way for Miller, then in jail for more than a hundred days, for refusing to identify Libby as his source, to be released and testify against Libby.
In an August 6, 2005 story in the American Prospect, Waas first disclosed that it was Libby who had first provided Plame's name to Miller.
That same story also disclosed that Libby was encouraging Miller to stay in jail and not reveal that Libby was her source. After reading Waas' story, prosecutor Fitzgerald wrote a letter to Libby's attorney, citing Waas' reporting, demanding that Libby encourage Miller to finally testify. Fitzgerald wrote in the letter that "Libby had simply decided that encouraging Ms. Miller to testify was not in his best interest", that Libby discouraging Miller to testify so as to thwart the special counsel's investigation might be possibly construed as an obstruction of justice or witness tampering. As a result, Libby then wrote and called Miller saying that it was alright for her to testify. After spending more than a hundred days in jail, Miller was released, whereupon she provided testimony and evidence to prosecutors against Libby, directly leading to Libby's indictment, and subsequent conviction, on multiple federal criminal charges of obstruction of justice and perjury. Washington Post media columnist Howard Kurtz wrote on April 17, 2006, that Waas' account "set in motion the waiver springing Miller from jail on contempt charges."
Regarding these same stories on the Plame case, as well as his earlier stories on the misrepresentation of intelligence information by the Bush administration to take the U.S. to war with Iraq, New York University journalism professor and press critic Jay Rosen wrote that Waas had the promise to be his generation's ""new Bob Woodward": Rosen wrote that the most significant story of that time was how Bush and top aides had "deceptively drove the nation to war." Rosen had concluded that Waas had emerged as the leading reporter on that story.
Several of Waas's later published accounts of that aspect of the Plame affair informed his Union Square Press book on the Libby trial published in June 2007, which he discusses in some detail in his interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!.