Jake Tapper: The Trial That Exposed the War on Terror

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1:04We are joined by journalist and author Jake Tapper to talk about his new book, Race Against Terror. It's a gripping true story about one of the most remarkable terrorism cases in American history, tracking a decade old murder, a sudden confession and a race to deliver justice with no evidence. Jake takes us inside the investigation, the evolution of terrorism, and the ongoing tension between national security and civil liberties. So this was a fascinating book for so many different reasons, but why does this case matter? Well, first off, it gives us a very good understanding of the history of Al Qaeda, the manifestation of terrorism, and how pluralistic societies like the United States that have criminal procedures and a criminal process and a presumption of innocence for its citizen and frankly others are secure in the system.

1:54So even though we're fighting with and dealing with a murderer, we've got to treat that murderer like he's innocent. And it's just a fascinating story. Think about where we are today in America, where the president of the United States is ordering missiles to be shot at boats that he's saying are drug dealers. No due process, no civil procedure, no criminal procedure. But yet in this case, we're following the book and we're following the book with great success. So listen, I loved it. Also tells us about some of the threats that we have today, not just terrorist threats, but how we handle our society and how we handle our constitution.

2:28So applaud us to Jake Tapper for writing Race Against Terror. Let's get into it.

2:37Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. Joining us now is Jake Tapper. In addition to being a world-famous CNN anchor, he's a best-selling author, And he's out with a new book, Race Against Terror, Chasing an Al Qaeda Killer at the Dawn of the Forever War. I mean, first of all, it's an amazing title, but it's an even better book. And Jake has been on the show before, so he knows the drill here. I learned so much in this book that I did not know about Al Qaeda, about our tactics in terms of how we were deploying ourselves to kill these people or capture these people. But why this book?

3:18What drew you to this? And I know you've researched it over a year ago, et cetera, put it together. What got you interested in this topic, Jake? The truth is I just heard the story in a situation of happenstance, and I just thought it was fascinating. The story begins about how I came across the story. three years ago i threw a birthday party for my son it was a paintball party so it was out in the boonies in virginia so adults were invited to stick around and have pizza and refreshments right one of the dads one of the dads came over to me and said oh i know so and so from your book the outpost and i said oh yeah that book was really tough to write because the pentagon keeps such crappy records and they don't share them and he said tell me about it and he starts telling me this story starts spinning this yarn about how he's an assistant u.s attorney in brooklyn he gets a call the italians have picked up this guy who claims to be al-qaeda uh they go to italy they hear him confess to killing americans and conspiring to blow up the u.s embassy and then he and his colleagues at the u.s attorney's office and also in the fbi have like a finite period of time to to prove it to prove the case here it's like the opposite of a whodunit here's the done it here's the guy who done it you have to prove the case and he just tells me how they prove the case and i love that stuff on like police procedurals just the finding the fingerprint finding the witness find you know all that uh investigative stuff and i just and it was just so interesting i said to him when he was done telling the story has anybody written about this um and he said you know people wrote about it when he was tried in 2017 and sentenced in 2018, but nobody really had ever captured the story of like how improbable all of this was.

5:15I mean, this was as of now, still the only foreign terrorist ever tried in a criminal court in the U.S. for killing service members in a war zone. That's never happened before. Although there is a guy in Virginia right now who might become the second foreign terrorist. He was behind the Abbey Gate shooting bombing, suicide bombing. So anyway, it was just this once in a lifetime story and it had not been covered. And I most of the stuff, the nonfiction stuff that I write is because I want to know more about it and nobody else is reporting it. So I go and report it. I mean, there's just so many different things in here, though.

5:48You've got to build a criminal case against this person. You've got the justice versus terror, civil courts versus military tribunals. But let's go directly to Ibrahim Haran. I'm assuming I'm pronouncing his name roughly right, but he's called Spin for what reason? Why do they call him Spin? Spin Ghoul is Pashto for the White Rose. And when he was in terrorist training camp, this guy was from originally, his ethnicity is Niger. He was raised in Saudi Arabia, but he's from Niger. So he's very, very, very dark, very dark African, not a drop of non-African blood in his ancestry. And, you know, there's racism in Al Qaeda and there's racism in the Arab world.

6:38And he was called the White Rose because he was very black. And that's that was the big joke in the terrorist training camp. But it was his nom de guerre, his war name. And when the Italians called the FBI and said, have you heard he says his name is Spin Ghoul. Have you ever heard of him? The Americans had heard of him because there were detainees at Gitmo that had talked about him because he was somebody who had successfully participated in a deadly ambush against U.S. service members and also was then sent to Nigeria to blow up the American embassy there. But he didn't he did not end up doing that.

7:18But, you know, the Al Qaeda operatives knew who he was and had talked about him. so let's go to david bitcower he's the assistant u.s attorney in the eastern district of new york he's one of the central prosecutors he's the dad he's the dad that told me the story at the paintball party yeah so i mean this is unbelievable you're at the paintball story or you literally have a jean le carré novel being regaled to you but it's actually true it's a good it's a good lesson for reporters like ask people when you're in a social situation ask people their best story that they have in their back pocket, maybe you get a book out of it.

7:56Well, I mean, what I'm impressed with, I mean, I don't know him, but he seems like a very by-the-book guy though, right? He's going through the process. He's using the judicial system. He's even concerned about things like civil procedure. And there's something in our country called the Constitution, Jake. I think you've heard of the Constitution. I have heard of it. see a few people in the country that want to ignore the Constitution, but not this guy. Big Cowher is like a by the book guy. So tell us a little bit about him and tell us a little bit about the juggling dilemma of bringing the case and how he has to work the case into the matrix.

8:36So the he's an assistant U.S. attorney, which sounds impressive to me, but it's not that high up on the totem pole of the judicial system. So he and his colleague, Shreve Ariel, start working this case, but they have to, you know, they have to work it because it's 2011. Their choice is let the Italians deal with him and the Italians will just let him free. They'll put him in a refugee camp and he'll escape. And then, you know, he's he has said he wants to kill as many Americans as possible. He has said the 1998 embassy bombings are his, you know, that's his matrix, his life's ambition. So they really have an impossible choice.

9:19Do they try to prove this incredibly difficult case or do they not do it and risk having this guy go free? So to them, there's no choice. They have to try to prosecute him. And it just becomes this very difficult challenge. First, they have to figure out which ambush he participated in in Afghanistan. Then they have to track down all the information they can about that ambush, track down all the soldiers they can. They have to track down any sort of physical evidence from that ambush that might exist. And, you know, even if there's a record of it, photographs of it, they have to then try to find the physical objects, which, you know, this is a battle that took place in 2003 and they're in 2011, 2012, trying to track down evidence.

10:06And they have the challenge of having very, very skeptical bosses who give their case a lot of scrutiny. Well, how are you going to prove this? How are you going to prove that? At the time, it's tough to imagine. But a lot of people might remember that in 2011, 2012, the idea of bringing a foreign terrorist to the United States to be tried was so controversial. Republicans, Democrats, nobody wanted them here. There was almost this. I mean, you know, it's it's it had only been 10 years after 9-11. People were still terrorized. And there was this fear that if they come here, maybe they'll escape and maybe they'll walk around the streets just killing people.

10:50In addition, in 2010, there had been the trial of the first and only Gitmo detainee tried in a criminal court, this guy Galani. He was tried and he was acquitted of 284 of the 285 charges. This has to do with the 1998, I'm sorry, yeah, 1998 embassy bombings. So he was acquitted of all but one of the charges. So there was a real fear. If we bring him here, what happens if we don't get a conviction? or what happens if he escapes and this and that. So there were all these hurdles that they had to clear. And all these people in the Justice Department and the Obama White House and the U.S. Attorney's Office in Brooklyn, all of these people that they had to satisfy.

11:35In addition to them, of course, that's the U.S. Attorney's Office. Then there's the FBI. They're investigating the case with Bittkauer and Shreve. And they are also doing their investigation and trying to find out as much information as they can. What's amazing is that they pulled this all off, that they got all the evidence that they needed, that they tracked down physical evidence, witness testimony, et cetera. But the case was just so fascinating and the expertise that you learn. I mean, this is, it was written, I wrote this because I just thought it was an interesting story and I wanted to write it like a thriller so that people would enjoy it, but also like learn something that I learned about this case.

12:18But also it is kind of a love letter to a functioning government where prosecutors and the FBI and politicians and public servants, everybody works together and tries to protect Americans. And I don't know that we have the same situation going on today because a lot of the prosecutors who are really experts on these types of investigations are being sidelined or even fired for political reasons. There's a guy in the book named George Toskis. He did not cooperate with the book. He didn't talk to me ever. Not a friendly to media kind of guy, but I know that he was amazing at his job and he's been sidelined because he signed off on the Mar-a-Lago classified documents warrant.

13:06And there are a number of decisions like that that have been made in the last nine months. And I think they make the country less safe. You know, I mean, I have so many different reactions to the book, but that was one. You got there a little bit ahead of me. I read the book. I took criminal procedure in law school. I obviously took constitutional law. And I was like, it was so refreshing to see that process. There's another narrative going on right now in our country that I'd like you to address. And that is what you just said. People are like, well, the book is messy, Jake, right? It's messy.

13:39You've got to go through process. You've got to deal with people that are double and triple checking your work. And the presumption is always on the innocent. And the presumption is always that the government has to be off the back of the person, even if it's a person that's a wretched terrorist. And yet now we have people who, if they don't like a court ruling, they'll say that there's an insurrection going on or there's an act of judicial terrorism. And so there's a group of people in the country that have said, hey, this process that got us 250 years of success and great prosperity and industrialization, innovation, et cetera, we want to throw that out the window for something that's cleaner, in their minds at least, cleaner and more expeditious.

14:27And so when you write a book like this and you see what's going on right now, what did we do wrong? Did we do anything wrong or is this just the way a civilization works and we burn a fuse and we eventually get to people that no longer want to respect the process? Or did we do something wrong that triggered all of this? Well, it's a complicated question. I mean, so this was the first foreign terrorist ever tried in a criminal court for killing American service members abroad. Donald Trump is attempting to bring the second foreign terrorist to a criminal court for killing American service members abroad.

15:08This guy, Jafar, who's in a prison or a jail in Virginia right now for his role in the Abbey Gate suicide bombings. So there is to a degree a recognition, I think, that the criminal justice pursuit of terrorists can be an effective way to do it. and early in Trump's first term, Attorney General Sessions was upset to hear about the prosecution of Spengool. There was an attempt to bring another terrorist to the U.S. for prosecution and he would not have it because he doesn't think terrorists deserve to have rights. And he was not having it. He was not happy to hear about Spengool, but he didn't interrupt the trial because that was that was already about to happen.

15:56But we are now in a situation where the prosecution and criminal court of Jafar is going to happen. So on one level, I think that society has evolved, including the Trump administration, to keep pursuing this lane that I think proved successful. And if you just look at the comparison of how many people, how many terrorists have been tried in a military tribunal versus how many in criminal courts, criminal courts has just been far more effective. It's more than 600 terrorists have been tried, most of them convicted. And in military tribunals, I think it's two people have been convicted and one of them, one of the charges was overturned.

16:33So it's not even close. Now, on the other hand, as you note, there is this push to label judges that come up with rulings that the administration disagrees with to call them terrorists. That's Stephen Miller you're quoting, I believe. And in addition, in addition to George Toskos, who was legendary and has now been sidelined, last week, the guy in charge of the Jafar prosecution, a line prosecutor named Michael Benary, was fired. Why was he fired? Because some MAGA activist named Julie Kelly said online that he was against she guessed that he was against the Comey indictment at which our sources suggest at CNN that that's not true at all.

17:29He had nothing to do with it, but they fired him. He put up a letter on his door on his last day, Friday, in which he said that his firing hurts the case against Jafar and that current Justice Department leadership is more interested in going after the president's perceived enemies than protecting the American people. That is a stark warning from a line prosecutor for the American people. Now, why is why is that not bigger news? I don't know. I say it every time I can. I did it on my show. I wrote about it for The Atlantic and and for CNN. I can't explain it. But we are in a situation where this lack of respect for expertise could end up really hurting us.

18:13Yeah. Well, I mean, I think we both honestly know it's the Steve Bannon flood the zone. They flooded the zone with so much stuff that we've sort of gotten numb to a lot of the things that are going on and it's difficult and hard to react to everything. So I want to get to the radicalization of this man. He's undocumented. He's in Saudi Arabia. He goes, I guess he goes on a pilgrimage, as you're describing. And he stays in Saudi and he gets radicalized. And so what's going on in Saudi Arabia that creates Al Qaeda, also known as the base? Tell us about the Wahhabis. Tell us about the secular Saudis versus the more orthodox Saudis.

19:02And how does this terrorist community develop there and why? So Spengul is raised in Saudi Arabia. His parents are from Niger. They went to Saudi Arabia to do pilgrimage to Mecca, and then they just stayed. And they basically were just indentured servants that lived in basically in poverty. So there weren't a lot of options for Spengul. And if people think racism is bad in the United States, they should see how black people are treated in Saudi Arabia because it's not even close. He was raised at a time when in the 1990s and the late 80s, jihadists were regarded as heroes. And it wasn't even particularly controversial before 9-11 in that part of the world.

19:53It was the heroes fighting against the Soviets in Afghanistan, the heroes fighting against Russia in Chechnya. A lot of the victims of aggression in the Balkans were Muslim. So he was raised in a place where, you know, successful jihadists were his childhood heroes. And there was one in his neighborhood who worked for the Saudi government and was able to forge for him travel documents so that when he was old enough, he just went into the rat line and just flew to Pakistan, where he was easily hooked up with al-Qaeda operatives that brought him to Afghanistan and where he trained. This is before 9-11.

20:43This is where he trained in the Al-Faruq terrorist camp and the like. And you can almost, I wouldn't say see the appeal of it, but you can almost understand why a young man with no future might find appealing the notion of going on an adventure of some sort. Uh, and if he's being propagandized his whole life about the importance of fighting the infidel, um, going to some training camp with his bros might be appealing. And then 9-11 happens. And then all of a sudden it's a, it's a different war altogether, but that's, that's how he ended up there. But his zealotry was lifelong. Uh, and you know, this becomes part of the debate in the case, is he sane?

21:35Is he even sane? And that's always a discussion, I think, when you deal with any sort of zealot. Where does zealotry end and insanity begin? It's tough to say. But the - And again, that would also affect his civil liberties if he's insane too, right? So we have that element of criminal procedure. But when I opened the book at first and I read The Forever war, it always hurts me. It's like a dagger in my heart. So there was a very large group of people right after 9-11 that were actually begging the Bush administration not to overreact to the terrorist attack. And one of those people, frankly, was a Wall Street luminary that's now been demonized by the right.

22:18It was George Soros. He wrote an op-ed. It was either in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, Jake. He said, listen, it's a horrible tragedy. Don't overreact. You'll play into bin Laden's hands. And bin Laden wrote about this on the dark web. He said he would hit us on our homeland. We would respond aggressively. We would bomb their mud huts. We would kill a lot of people, but we would bleed out our treasury. They would kill our military over there. And then we would go after our own civil liberties. and when I think about the this case and the forever war you know not to overuse a baseball analogy I feel like it's six nothing bin laden yeah bin laden's been replaced he's dead and gone there's a relief pitcher in now but he got a lot right we blew a hole in our treasury we've we've mounted a 30 we went from George Washington to George W.

23:12Bush seven trillion Jake We added 31 trillion Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Biden, Trump. And so I'm just wondering if the forever war, if we're 50 years after the forever war, sometime 50 years from now, 2076, are they saying, wow, they hurt themselves so badly and then they tribalized they couldn't pull it back together? Because this book, if it was written about a 2025 case, would give me great hope. But this book is not written about a 2025 case. It's written about a 2011 case. So what say to you to all of that in the context of the forever war, Jake? It is a depressing and bleak thought that bin Laden could have been correct in his prediction of an overreaction.

24:11And it reminds me of two things. It reminds me of President Biden going to Israel and telling Israel not to act. Don't make the mistake that we made. Remember he said that. Don't act out of anger. Don't make the mistake we made. And I don't think Netanyahu was listening. And it also reminds me, I just randomly saw a clip on threads of this very profound movie in retrospect called The Siege. that what's unbelievable about, it's a Denzel Washington, Annette Bening, Bruce Willis thriller that, I think it's by Edward Zwick or Marshall Hershkovits, I forget which one, but it's about, first of all, it came out in 1998.

25:03That's what's the most amazing thing about the siege. It's about Islamic terrorism happening in Brooklyn. and then it's about basically declaring martial law in Brooklyn because of the big Muslim population there. And the argument is it's a bad idea. Bruce Willis plays the general who is telling them, do not declare martial law and send us in there. You don't want us to do it. And then there's another scene where Denzel Washington is saying, what if what they want us to do is to declare martial law and get rid of our civil liberties? What if what they want us to do is round up kids And, you know, and it's everything.

25:41And like it's the fact is that this the fact that this came out in 1998 is what makes it so profound. Not if this movie had come out in five years ago, who cares? But like the fact that it predicted the overreaction, I think it's fair to say. What's interesting about the war on terror in terms of this book, in my view, is I go into it with an open mind about I go into it, I think, assuming that President Bush and Vice President Cheney and Secretary Rumsfeld are all trying to keep us safe. And they're throwing, you know, their 9-11 was a horrible day and it terrified the country, it terrified the world, it changed everything.

26:23And they're trying to do what they need to do to keep us safe. The question is, and it's easy to do this from the luxury of 2025, is did what they do make us safer? And in terms of this small slice of the war on terror, the idea of is it better to take these foreign terrorists and throw them in Gitmo or put them in a military tribunal or prosecute them in a criminal court, I came away. I did not go into it with this mindset. And I don't write this like a polemic. It's people can reach whatever conclusion they want. But my view is that the way that they did it with Spin Ghoul, prosecuting him, getting evidence, building an airtight case makes us safer.

27:09because I think about an alternative world where he's picked up by the Italians in 2008. And instead of going to a criminal court and having this huge investigation into what he did, he's just thrown in Gitmo. And then I got to assume after five or 10 years, somebody would have his case and they'd say, you don't even have any evidence against him. All you have is this crazy confession and he's a lunatic, who knows? And then the Americans would probably be like, oh, you're right. And then they'd send him to Niger, Saudi Arabia, Oman. And then he would go and kill as many Americans as he could. And so I came to the conclusion.

27:43And again, this isn't in the book. This is just my view of what I learned. And maybe people will leave the book and have a different interpretation. That's how I wrote it. I wrote it like a thriller and people can make up their own mind. But I think that prosecution made us safer because Spingool, this doesn't spoil the book, but the Spingool was found guilty and he's in prison for the rest of his life. And those gold star families in the military men and women who were affected by the attack. They they don't have closure. They're still in pain, but they have a sense that their government cared and they do have an ability to, OK, the killer was is in prison and whether or not they can go on with their life, I don't know.

28:23But that's, you know, all the families, all the 9-11 families waiting for these trials of 9-11 co-conspirators. It still haven't happened yet because the military commissions can't do it. It's incredible. I'm with you, Jake. It made us safer, but it also, it made the innocent safer. It made the innocent safer. You know? I mean, you know, I mean, the unjustly accused, it's also made safer. So, all right. So, you remember this from my podcast. This is something people like, so we do it every time. I've got your book down to five words. I'm going to say the word, and then you react to the word. Okay, you ready?

28:56If I say the word terrorism, Jake, you say what? Scary. justice. Elusive. That's a really good one, actually. I'm going to use that. Extremism. Common. What about Al-Qaeda?

29:20Organized. Yeah, it's incredible. It's literally like a corporation when you really think about the layers of it. All right, let's go to your protagonist or your antagonist, ibrahim spin haran