Murray Waas

Amin ruled as military dictator of Uganda from 1971 to 1979, and has been described as "one of the most brutal despots in modern world history".

His rule was defined by torture, support for international terrorism, extrajudicial killings, the barbaric and random murders of ordinary citizens, and ethnic cleansing.

Amin was believed to have murdered between at least 150,000 and 300,000 Ugandans in carrying out genocide against his own people.

Amnesty International has estimated the number of people killed as high as 500,000.

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.

In 1987, when Waas was only twenty-six years old, he learned that he had a life-threatening "advanced form" of cancer.

Murray S. Waas is an American independent journalist and investigative journalist best known for his coverage of the White House planning for the 2003 invasion of Iraq and ensuing controversies and American political scandals such as the Plame affair (also known as the "CIA leak grand jury investigation", the "CIA leak scandal", and "Plamegate").

For much of his career, Waas focused on national security reporting, but has also written about social issues and corporate malfeasance.

His articles about the second Iraq war and Plame affair matters have appeared in National Journal, where he has worked as a staff correspondent and contributing editor, The Atlantic, and, earlier The American Prospect.

Waas was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and originally hoped to have a career in law and city politics ("To be the district attorney and mayor of the City of Philadelphia").

He attended George Washington University.

He first began taking classes at age 16, while still in high school, as part of a program that allowed some accomplished students to begin college early.

He later left college prior to graduation to instead work as a journalist.

Years later, on June 26, 2006, Washington Post media writer Howard Kurtz years disclosed 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 [such] 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 seek justice through the courts because of medical mistakes.

Although he initially shied away from writing about health care because of his history as a cancer survivor, in 22010, Waas weighed in with a series of articles for Reuters, detailing how many of the nation's largest health insurance companies, improperly, and even illegally, canceled the policies of tens of thousands of policyholders shortly after they were diagnosed with HIV, cancer, and other life-threatening but costly diseases.

One story disclosed that the nation's then largest health insurer, WellPoint, using a computer algorithm, identified women recently diagnosed with breast cancer and then singled them out for cancellation of their policies, without a legitimate cause to do so.

The story not only caused considerable and immediate public outrage, but led Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, and President Barack Obama, to call on WellPoint to end the practice.

Pressured by the Obama administration, WellPoint and the nation's other largest health insurers agreed to immediately end the practice.

Waas was credited with saving the lives of countless other cancer patients like himself, and making sure that tens of thousands of other people did not have their insurance unfairly canceled.

He won the Barlett & Steele Award for Business Investigative Reporting from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication of Arizona State University as well as other honors for the stories.

While still attending college, Waas began working for American newspaper columnist Jack Anderson.

His journalistic work has since been published in such publications and outlets as The New Yorker, The Atlantic,The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Guardian.

The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, McClatchy Newspapers, Reuters, the Associated Press, ABC News, The New York Review of Books, New York Magazine, Foreign Policy, Vox, Harper's, The New Republic, The American Prospect, The Nation, and The Village Voice.

In his twenties, Waas was a staff writer for The Village Voice.

The current masthead of the Voice lists Waas as a "Contributors Emeritus" to the newspaper, along with such other notable writers, critics, investigative reporters, and cartoonists who worked for the paper during the same era, as Wayne Barrett, Jack Newfield, Teresa Carpenter, Ron Rosenbaum, the late Norman Mailer, Mim Udovitch, Matt Groening and Mark Alan Stamaty.

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 an obituary of Anderson, The New York Times wrote that Anderson's column was "the nation's most widely read, longest-running political column."

Anderson liked to boast that he and his relatively small staff of mostly young reporters had done daily "what Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein did just once when they dug out the truth of the Watergate scandal."

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 academicians 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.

The idea that economic sanctions might lead to Amin's overthrow was originally conceived by Bill Goold, who proposed such an embargo in a college paper he wrote as a student at Oberlin College.

Immediately after graduation, Goold went to work for then-Rep.

Don Pease, a Democrat of Ohio, who introduced legislation requiring that the U.S. impose economic sanctions against Amin.

But as a freshman member of Congress, and Goold, as a young staffer to a freshman, Pease and Goold faced a daunting challenge in generating interest in their cause.

And when they did, the attention was often unfavorable: The State Department, The Washington Post editorial page, and the Jimmy Carter administration opposed such sanctions.