Excerpt: FEET TO THE FIRE (John Walcott/Knight-Ridder)

[kpete]

Excerpt: Feet to the Fire
Submitted by davidswanson on Tue, 2006-01-03 09:17. Media
By Kristina Borjesson and John Walcott, AlterNet
Posted on January 2, 2006, Printed on January 3, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/29920/
Editor's Note: The following excerpt, an interview from 'Feet to the Fire' by Kristina Borjesson, is reprinted with permission from Prometheus Books.


In this interview, Walcott reveals the inner workings of how he and his team do what they do, providing a fascinating window into how the very best journalism is achieved.

John Walcott: It was clear to everyone within days of 9/11 that the administration was already beginning to turn its attention to Iraq, so the reporting we did from the very start was on three tracks.

There was a terrorist track that had to do with al Qaeda, and what was known about that. There was an Afghan war track, where we formed a fairly extensive team of people from all over Knight Ridder to go to Afghanistan and cover combat operations while some of us here tried to learn what we could about al Qaeda as documents were uncovered.

So there was a terrorism track, an Afghanistan track, and almost from the beginning, an Iraq track. Literally the day after 9/11, people either close to or in the administration began talking about Iraq. As 2001 turned into 2002, it became clear that the president had made the fundamental decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Warren Strobel and I wrote a story about it on February 13, 2002, "Bush Has Decided to Overthrow Hussein."

The lead was: "President Bush has decided to oust Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein from power and ordered the CIA, the Pentagon and other agencies to devise a combination of military, diplomatic and covert steps to achieve that goal, senior U.S. officials said Tuesday."

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