The Reason Interview goes deep with the artists, activists, entrepreneurs, and policymakers who are making the world a more libertarian—or at least more interesting—place by challenging worn-out orthodoxies and ideas.

Today's guest is Jake Tapper, the host of The Lead on CNN and author of the new book, Race Against Terror: Chasing an Al Qaeda Killer at the Dawn of the Forever War.

He tells Nick Gillespie why it matters that Donald Trump is following Barack Obama's lead in trying terrorists in criminal courts rather than military tribunals, why he believes the Trump administration is unleashing an all-out offensive against journalists critical of the president, and what the legacy media got way wrong with Joe Biden and COVID.

They also discuss the future of journalism in an age of media consolidation, where Free Press upstart Bari Weiss is heading up CBS News—and possibly CNN, too.

Previous appearance:

Jake Tapper on The Hellfire Club, Donald Trump's Big Lies, and D.C.'s 'Bullshit Waterfall', May 11, 2018

0:00 –Introduction

1:34 –Race Against Terror

5:25 –The Bush administration and the war on terror

8:39 –The legality and effectiveness of torture

17:06 –President Trump's approach to foreign policy

22:19 –Media censorship and the FCC

29:43 –CBS News, CNN, and the challenges facing legacy media

40:14 –The rise of independent media

52:07 –Joe Biden's decline and its impact on the Democratic Party

58:37 –What is being underreported in the second Trump administration?

1:06:05 –Generational shifts in political views

______________________________________________________________________________

Transcript

This is an AI-generated, AI-edited transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.

Nick Gillespie: Jake Tapper, thanks for talking to Reason.

Jake Tapper: It's great to be here. Thank you.

The new book is Race Against Terror: Chasing an Al-Qaeda Killer at the Dawn of the Forever War. We're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about Trump's attitudes toward the press. We're going to talk a little bit about Joe Biden. And have we actually digested the debacle that was the final months of the Joe Biden presidency?

But let's talk about Race Against Terror: Chasing an Al-Qaeda Killer at the Dawn of the Forever War. This takes us back 25 years almost—to 9/11, Afghanistan, and the beginning of what was called the global war on terror, the global war on terrorism. What brought you back to this topic? Because you've already written about Afghanistan.

So this story is the story of the one and only foreign terrorist that was brought to the U.S. to be tried in a criminal court for killing service members abroad.

I first got interested in the story because I heard about it just randomly at my son's birthday party. One of the prosecutors was a fellow—and he told me the story. He said something about The Outpost, and I said, "That book was really difficult to write because the military keeps bad records and they don't share them."

He said, "Tell me about it." And then he proceeds to tell the story about how he had to prove—he and his colleagues had to prove a case—a criminal case, that would be upheld in court against a terrorist for actions on the battlefield that took place in 2003. And an attempt to blow up the U.S. embassy in Nigeria not long after that. And like all of the sleuthing and the detective work that they all had to do.

It was just this incredible story about all the stuff I love from police procedurals like CSI or Cold Case or whatever. How do you prove a case?

And yeah, it reads—I mean, it's incredible—because the Al-Qaeda killer, who is known…I can't pronounce his actual Nigerian name, but he's known as Spin Ghul. He showed up in Italy. He was arrested by Italian authorities and was bragging to them, basically that, "I killed American soldiers."

Yeah. Very proud of it. Very proud.

Yeah. But then they had to prove it, because that was his assertion, right?

They had to prove it because it was the Obama years, and Obama had closed off Gitmo from any new terrorist suspects. Obama wanted to try terrorists in criminal court. And that was really controversial at the time. People might not remember, but—Trump is trying to do it now. Spin Ghul was the first terrorist tried like this. Trump is trying to do it with a guy named Jafar. Not controversial at all—no hue and outcry. The guy is sitting—this terrorist is sitting in a cell not far from where you and I are sitting, in Virginia, and nobody's acting afraid about it.

But at the time, people acted as though these terrorists had superhuman powers, and if you brought them to Manhattan or Brooklyn, they would escape and wreak havoc.

But in any case, the sleuthing—what was so interesting to me about it because it was just proving a case that was not just cold. I mean nobody…people are generally not brought to court for killing people in a war. It just generally doesn't happen. So the sleuthing was so interesting.

And then the subtext also became the different ways—and this wasn't intentional in terms of like, I wasn't trying to give a history of the war on terror—but you had to tell it. You had to describe what was different about Bush, to Obama, to Trump, because it was part of the hurdles that these prosecutors and FBI agents had to jump over.

Can you explain that a little bit? Again, this is history worth recovering. A couple of weeks ago, I talked to Dan Krauss, who came out with a new documentary about Afghanistan called Bodyguard of Lies, and it again—you know, it's amazing. This is recent history, but it feels like a million years ago, and we've forgotten all the nuances.

The Bush administration—what was their approach to the war on terror, and particularly to military combatants—or noncombatants, but just suspected terrorists? How did they deal with people like that?

Well, they basically set up an entirely new system of law. Now, they would argue that it was rooted in previous systems. But the idea is, these are not criminals, they're enemy combatants. Which is not the same as a prisoner of war, by the way. Prisoners of war have different rights. These are enemy combatants. We're going to send them to Guantanamo Bay. We are going to engage in enhanced interrogation—or what the rest of the world calls torture. We are going to engage in extraordinary rendition—or what the rest of the world calls kidnapping.

And to give them the benefit of the doubt, they were thrown into this situation where America and the world are terrified because 3,000 Americans, almost, had been killed in this attack. And they feel like they can't deal with it in the normal system of criminal laws and justice. And so they create this other system.

Now, that system proved problematic in many, many ways, as your readers and viewers and listeners know very well. One of them is, it didn't exactly endear the rest of the world to the United States.

So when I'm talking about—when I write in this period of 2011, and we're dealing with the Italian government—has this Al-Qaeda terrorist who claims he has killed Americans an