On 9/11 2001, the World Trade Center is destroyed by the Al Qaeda terrorist organization. In the resulting tumult, the reporters of the Knight-Ridder news service, Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel under the editorship of John Walcott, hear odd reports that President Bush's senior administration is not so much concerned with finding the Al Qaeda leader, Osama Bin Laden, as they are in blaming the secular dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein. Despite their intelligence sources saying that Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, the K-R reporters discover that the White House is obsessed with finding any excuse to attack Iraq with cherry-picking intelligence reports and blatant lies by its officials. As the journalists dig deeper, their competitors uncritically repeat the Bush Administration's falsehoods that too much of the public is gullible enough to believe, making their quest to find and print the truth proves as a frustrating struggle as events barrel to a needless war.