Excerpt: Feet to the Fire

Editor's Note: The following excerpt, an interview from 'Feet to the Fire' by Kristina Borjesson, is reprinted with permission from Prometheus Books.

More often than any other journalist or news organization, Knight Ridder was mentioned by those in "Feet to the Fire" as the best source for post-9/11 reporting.

The person most responsible for setting this platinum standard of journalism is John Walcott.

Long after the Twin Towers had collapsed, Walcott and his crack team of reporters were virtually alone in their pursuit of what the real intelligence analysts were saying about the White House's case against Saddam.

Cumulatively, Knight Ridder's reporting damns the Bush administration in devastating detail. The thing is, for now, Knight Ridder isn't on the radar where Team Walcott's work would really count: Washington and New York. Nonetheless, Walcott persists

Besides his obvious zeal for journalistic excellence, Walcott felt an acute need to look hard at the rationales for going to war for another reason: "Unlike a lot of our competitors who write for the people who send other people to war, we write for the people who get sent to war, and for their mothers and fathers and their sisters and brothers and their sons and daughters. We don't publish in Washington and New York. We write for Columbus, Georgia, and Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and Fort Hood, Texas, and Shaw Air Force Base, South Carolina, where the people who get sent to war live and where they leave their families behind."

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."

Kristina Borjesson: What were your colleagues reporting at the time?

JW: Nothing of that sort, and there's been a big semantic debate about when the decision to invade Iraq was made, because the decision to overthrow Saddam was not necessarily a decision to invade the country.

But it's becoming clearer that the decision was made a good deal earlier than the administration let on. A British memo that recently was leaked to the Sunday Times of London reported that the president had decided to invade Iraq before the end of July 2002.

Warren Strobel and I wrote a story ["'Downing Street' Memo Indicates Bush Made Intelligence Fit Iraq Policy," May 5, 2005] about it a few days after it appeared in Britain because it not only says that the decision was made much earlier than the administration has said it was, but it also reports that the administration arranged the intelligence about Iraq to support what it knew was a weak case for war:

A highly classified British memo, leaked in the midst of Britain's just-concluded election campaign, indicates that President Bush decided to overthrow Iraqi President Saddam Hussein by summer 2002 and was determined to ensure that U.S. intelligence data supported his policy."

"The document, which summarizes a July 23, 2002, meeting of British Prime Minister Tony Blair with his top security advisers, reports on a visit to Washington by the head of Britain's MI-6 intelligence service. The visit took place while the Bush administration was still declaring to the American public that no decision had been made to go to war."

"There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable," the MI-6 chief said at the meeting, according to the memo.

"Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD, weapons of mass destruction."