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Legal View with Ashleigh Banfield

Chicago Teen's Online Profile Hints at Radical Beliefs; More Than Oil Funds ISIS; Coalition Air Strikes Continue

Aired October 07, 2014 - 12:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

ASHLEIGH BANFIELD, CNN ANCHOR: Just who is this 19-year-old from Illinois arrested at the airport? Was he on his way to join ISIS? Wait until you hear the letter that he wrote to his parents and see the likes that he got on his Facebook page.

Also this hour, talk about organized crime. ISIS isn't just smuggling oil and extorting citizens to finance their terrorist takeover. They're so entrenched, they're charging bank fees and collecting taxes, too.

And nearly a week after that Ebola diagnosis in Dallas, they are finally finished fumigating the contaminated apartment. And you'd assume they took every precaution to protect the next-door neighbors, especially all the kids next door, right?

Hello, everyone. I'm Ashleigh Banfield. Thanks, everyone, for joining us. Good to have you with us today.

Four men are being held in London at this hour on suspicion of plotting a terror attack. Scotland Yard says a number of homes and vehicles are being searched but there is no word yet on what authorities are looking for, nor what if anything they've actually found. The suspects are 20 and 21 years old. And officials say one was tased while being arrested. We're going to bring you more details of that just as soon as they come in to our offices.

He likes the Chicago Bulls. He likes "The Hunger Games." He likes Batman and allegedly ISIS. He likes ISIS. But for all the details we know about a Chicago area 19-year-old named Mohammed Hamzah Khan, some pretty important questions are still left unanswered, such as, who put up $4,000 to pay for Khan's travel to Turkey? Who was supposed to meet him when he got there and lead him into battle in Iraq and Syria if the allegations are true? The feds may have some ideas, they say, but for now they're saying just enough to keep Khan locked away in a country, a society he said that he'd come to hate. Here's CNN's Ted Rowlands.

TED ROWLANDS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Ashleigh, according to the criminal complaint, Khan did talk to investigators at the airport after he was arrested. But most of the evidence, according to that complaint, came from his home here in Bolingbrook, a suburb of Chicago. They found notes, drawings and they found a letter which sort of explains why an American teenager would want to travel overseas and fight for ISIS.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) ROWLANDS (voice-over): According to investigators, 19-year-old Mohammed Hamzah Khan was on his way to join ISIS when he was arrested over the weekend after going through security at Chicago's O'Hare Airport. In a three-page letter allegedly left for his parents and signed "your loving son," Khan, accordingly to a criminal complaint, wrote that he was obligated to "migrate to the Islamic state" and that he couldn't bear the thought of his taxes in the U.S. being used to kill his, quote, "Muslim brothers and sisters." "The western societies are getting more immoral day by day," he allegedly wrote. "I do not want my kids being exposed to filth like this."

Investigators say Khan was expecting that a contact he met online would meet him in Turkey and take him to join ISIS in Iraq or Syria, but details about who bought his plane ticket and who he would meet were not revealed. Relatives declined to speak outside the family home in the Chicago working class suburb of Bolingbrook. Neighbors say Khan lived with his parents and a brother and sister and spent time at an Islamic center across the street.

TOMMY FERGUSON, NEIGHBOR: It's horrible, man, and it's in our backyard. You know, it's literally in my backyard and it's bad. It's bad.

ROWLANDS: Next door neighbor Steve Moore says he's known the family for about two years.

STEVE MOORE, NEIGHBOR: I was surprised. Really surprised. I mean the kid was polite, you know? I didn't expect anything like that in the least bit.

ROWLANDS: What's unclear is how the teenager was radicalized or if his family knew what he was planning. The criminal complaint mentions pro- ISIS writings and drawings found in common areas of the house, suggesting his views may have been known to members of his family. Khan made an initial appearance in federal court Monday. Members of his family were there in the courtroom, but had nothing to say after the hearing.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ROWLANDS: Khan is being held without bail. He does have a detention hearing scheduled for Thursday morning in Chicago.

Ashleigh.

BANFIELD: Ted Rowlands reporting for us, thank you for that.

In one respect, Mohammed Hamzah Khan is a typical American 19-year- old. And that brings me to the tech part of all of this with our tech correspondent Laurie Segall from CNN Money. We're also joined by Brett Larson, the host of the webcast and syndicated radio program "TechBytes," and CNN's legal analyst Paul Callan, who is clearly going to be a weigh-in on the evidence that all of that tech might provide.

Laurie, first to you. What do we know about the digital footprint because that's usually where the investigators start when we're looking for someone like this?

LAURIE SEGALL, CNN MONEY TECH CORRESPONDENT: Right. And that's where I started. And I actually spoke to some of his friends who said he went to a predominantly Muslim school. That he took some time off to study the Koran for a little bit. But when you look at his actual Facebook page and you look at his cover profile, one thing that was interesting is, there are a picture of lions. You're looking at that right there. One terrorism expert told me that image is overwhelmingly used by ISIS supporters. There are also some different images up there that -- he posted a picture that represents the four schools of thought in Islam. But you look at his life and --

BANFIELD: Are these all pictures of him, by the way, or do we know?

SEGALL: These are all pictures of him.

BANFIELD: They are. OK.

SEGALL: And you look at his life, he's talking about liking the Chicago Bulls, the L.A. Lakers. He loves comedy shows. So it's very difficult to put this together. And one thing I'll tell you, we actually gained access to his restricted Facebook profile through a friend. And he said on September 2nd, ISIS' actions are just going to make our lives harder. So it's very difficult when you look at all this evidence to put it together. You've got to think that they must have some pretty damning evidence against this guy that we're not necessarily seeing in this digital footprint.

BANFIELD: Which brings me to what we're not seeing.

SEGALL: Right.

BANFIELD: And, Brett Larson -

BRETT LARSON, HOST, "TECHBYTES": Right.

BANFIELD: Everybody now knows whatever you type at some point can come back to haunt you -

LARSON: Yes.

BANFIELD: Even if you press delete.

LARSON: Right.

BANFIELD: But there are plenty of places you can actually go to get archived material, right?

LARSON: There absolutely are. I mean, as I've often said, you know, when you tweet something, when you post something on Facebook, even if you think it's just being shared with your friends, it's like standing in the middle of the town square and yelling as loud as possible. You don't know who heard you or you don't know who may have been recording it or grabbing a screen grab. We do have --

BANFIELD: And if you delete, if you scrub, if you do all those things --

LARSON: Right, there could still be some -- there could be a friend of yours who was - who took grave concern about some of the things you were saying and thought, I'm going to start grabbing screen grabs of this stuff.

BANFIELD: And aren't there archival websites where you can actually get scrubbed material?

LARSON: And there are archival. I mean we've got things like The Way Back Machine (ph) where you can go back and look at websites from all the way back. Then we've got this 435 billion web pages saved over time.

BANFIELD: Wow!

LARSON: You know, the Internet makes it increasingly difficult for things that you've done to go away.

BANFIELD: (INAUDIBLE).

LARSON: We've seen legislation like that in the EU where people were saying, I want these things to disappear.

BANFIELD: So that brings me to you, Paul. Look, we don't know yet what they got in that remarkable warrant that they executed and got the handwritten notes and we don't necessarily maybe know what they've pulled from his digital past. This kid's 19. If you go back, say, I don't know, five years, to when he was 14, do all of those postings, do all of the things that he has done online, for the years that he's actually been able to type, do they all count to evidence?

PAUL CALLAN, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: I don't think they would in this case. The law uses a test and it's called, does the prejudicial impact exceed the probative value. In other words, are you going to be so prejudiced by this piece of evidence you won't get a fair trial? And I think if you went back five years, looking back to when, you know, he was in his early teenage years, how do we know that he's not just, you know, browsing the Internet? It doesn't prove that he's involved in planning and plotting. So I think that would be overly prejudicial and won't be allowed.

Now when you get closer in time, though, let's say within the last six months to a year, if there's a lot of digital footprint there showing a connection with ISIS, most definitely that will be admissible as circumstantial evidence that he was going to join that group.

BANFIELD: Well, we still have a lot to find out, but that's very helpful. Thank you, all three of you, Laurie Segall, Brett Larson and Paul Callan.

Stick around, if you would, because there is another story, the bigger picture of the war against ISIS. Fierce battles for control of the Syrian town of Kobani. While American and coalition planes continue to strike from the air, exactly what is the state of this battle? How much is this costing Americans? And for all the money spent, are they really making much of a indent into this whole thing? We're going to break all of that down for you ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BANFIELD: Despite five overnight U.S.-led air strikes around Kobani, ISIS fighters appear close to capturing the Syrian town near the border with Turkey. It seems like a head-scratcher, I know. A total of 13 strikes were launched overnight in Iraq and in Syria. The battle for Kobani, make no mistake, this has been a bloody one. Hundreds of fighters and civilians have been killed in several weeks of battle.

In the meantime, a hospital in northern Iraq received the bodies of 29 suspected ISIS militants last night. Most of the dead were killed in the U.S.-led air strikes. So that's a short snapshot of just the recent activity.

President Obama, however, is facing some blistering criticism and it's coming from a former member of his cabinet. All about how he's handled the war against ISIS. It's Leon Panetta, Obama's own former defense secretary. He's hammering his old boss on everything from ISIS to not arming the Syrian rebels soon enough. Panetta sat down with CNN's chief political analyst, Gloria Borger, and he told her that the president shouldn't have taken sending the ground troops to fight ISIS off of the table.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

LEON PANETTA, FORMER DEFENSE SECRETARY: I take the position that when you're commander in chief that you really ought to keep all options on the table to be able to have the flexibility to do what is necessary in order to defeat this enemy. But to make those air strikes work, to be able to do what you have to do, you don't - you don't just send planes in and drop bombs. You've got to have targets. You've got to know what you're going after. To do that, you do need people on the ground.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BANFIELD: Well, coming up at 1:00 Eastern Time, Wolf Blitzer is going to have Gloria Borger's entire interview with the former secretary of defense, Leon Panetta.

So ISIS may be making advancements despite some heavy fire coming from the air, from the U.S. led coalition, but it's important to remember that these air strikes, they're not helping the extremists' cause by any means. In fact, they're actually inflicting a whole lot of damage.

So let's take a look at what the U.S. air strikes in Syria and Iraq have actually accomplished and how much of it -- maybe this is the bigger question -- all of it has cost so far, at least for Americans. The total cost for the U.S. portion of the involvement so far, according to Central Command, is $62 million. The total number of air strikes so far, 266 in Iraq, 95 in Syria. Type of weapons that have been used so far, 36 surface-to-air missiles, 102 laser-guided bombs and 47 tomahawk missiles.

Want to see what all those munitions got us? Here are some examples of the type of targets against ISIS that the U.S. is going after and what actually has been inflicted. On October 5th, air strikes destroyed one bulldozer, two tanks and six firing positions northwest of al Mayadin, Syria. On September 28th, air strikes destroyed one tank and three armed vehicles in the town of Deir Ezzor, Syria. Same day, the coalition also destroyed one Humvee, four mobile oil refineries, and one command center north of Raqqa, Syria. On September 27th, the air strikes destroyed one building, that was at a border crossing, and also two armed vehicles near Kobani, Syria.

And while that settles in, joining me to talk about what the air strikes have actually accomplished and whether this coalition is actually on target, pardon the pun, is our global affairs analyst, Colonel James Reese.

So I think that, you know, when I look at those, it kind of looks like pinpricks. But I'm not you and you know a lot more about this than I do. $62 million is not that much in the grand scheme of things. But there's a lot of other countries doing a lot of work, too. Is this a good count of targets destroyed?

LIEUTENANT COLONEL JAMES REESE (RETIRED), CNN GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST: I don't know if count is the best word. Other countries are doing good things. What you got is the CENTCOM's roll-up. Nobody knows what Abu Dhabi or Saudi Arabia or others are doing. That's number one.

Just like the spokesman from the Pentagon said this morning, we are making some damage. Remember we talked about when we started this thing, we want to degrade in Syria, we have to prep for a counteroffensive in Iraq.

BANFIELD: So clearly ISIS can't just march along with great, big columns of fires and tanks and vehicles, et cetera. So that part has been disrupted.

But that would also tell me as the lay guy that their ability to take towns is disrupted as well, and we're looking at black flags flying over Kobani. How are they doing this if they're being disrupted?

REESE: Remember, unfortunately in the -- Twitter is killing it on Kobani right now. Kobani's never really been a target for any of the coalition to protect. It's a shame. The Kurds are there. They're fighting hard. We're giving them weapons to get in there. But it never was a targeted area to stop.

BANFIELD: So are these guys -- everyone says they're fierce and other people say, yes, they're fierce but they're not ten feet tall. But are they clever like foxes?

Have they adapted their fighting strategies knowing there's a lot of power coming from the air? Are they doing something different that we don't know about?

REESE: No. One of the things they do very well is they camouflage, they now have changed their tactics. They're going in with the populace. This is a large Sunni build-up. They have a lot of Sunnis that are helping them. BANFIELD: What might be distressing to a lot of people is that Leon

Panetta also said, brace yourself -- these are my words, but brace yourself effectively for a 30-year war. Does that make sense to you?

REESE: How many years has it been already since 2001? Add another 20 on top of that, there's 33.

BANFIELD: Settle in for the long haul.

REESE: Absolutely.

BANFIELD: Colonel, always good to see you.

Where does ISIS get all the money to arm those fighters to do their new tactics and get their weapons and machinery, et cetera, and all of their soldiers they pay?

We'll follow that money trail and show you how that terror group regularly takes in millions of dollars, up next.

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BANFIELD: By now you may know that ISIS got where it is through epic displays of outrageous evil, but it takes a whole lot more than just evil to conquer armies and take over cities. It takes money, a whole lot of money, and ISIS has that to spare.

CNN's senior investigative correspondent, Drew Griffin, takes us to the source -- make that, sources -- of the group's financial lifeline.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DREW GRIFFIN, CNN SENIOR INVESTIGATIVE CORRESPONDENT: This is the southernmost edge of Turkey, just across those hills is the border with Syria, in the area where extremist Islamic rebels, known as ISIS, are fighting to create an Islamic caliphate or Islamic state.

It is also in areas like villages like this where ISIS makes its money to finance its wars. Small oil-smuggling operations, some estimate adding up to millions of barrels in the last few months have been uncovered. The oil comes from refineries ISIS has taken inside Iraq and Syria. Up until just last week, it was easy to smuggle into this part of Turkey.

Why? Smuggled, cheap oil is a much-prized commodity here and it doesn't matter who's selling it. Even if it's your enemy. Buy gas at any station just across the border here in Turkey, and you'll see why it's so easy to overlook who is selling what. Gas here costs roughly $7.50 a gallon.

U.S. coalition forces just in the past week have destroyed, attacked and bombed ISIS oil facilities precisely to cut off the group's funding.

But if you think just knocking out ISIS's oil will stop this radical Islamic army, you don't understand just how many ways ISIS funds itself.

MATTHEW LEVITT, THE WASHINGTON INSTITUTE: We've described this as the best-financed group we've ever seen.

GRIFFIN: Matthew Levitt is a student of terror financing, working previously for the U.S. Treasury Department, the FBI, and now with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

ISIS, he says, is different than any other traditional terrorist group and is funded like no other.

Yes, there is oil. Yes, there are charitable donations from wealthy sympathizers in countries including Qatar and Kuwait.

But ISIS funds itself mostly from within. Born among the crooks and thugs of Iraq, it is at its roots, says Levitt, a criminal enterprise.

LEVITT: They were always primarily financed through domestic criminal activity within the borders of Iraq.

GRIFFIN: It's massive organized crime run amuck with no cops.

LEVITT: Exactly.

GRIFFIN: Want to do business in ISIS-controlled territory? You pay a tax. Want to move a truck down a highway? You pay a toll. Villagers in ISIS territory pay for just about everything.

LEVITT: There are reports that people in Mosul who want to take money out of their own bank accounts need to make a voluntary not-so- voluntary donation to the Islamic state, to ISIS.

MOUAZ MOUSTAFA, SYRIAN EMERGENCY TASK FORCE: They're taxing the people. That's a huge revenue.

GRIFFIN: Mouaz Moustafa is the executive director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force in Washington, D.C. He says ISIS literally formed in the void made by the pullout of U.S. troops and the retreating Iraqi army.

That kind of self-financing mob, he says, can't be destroyed from air strikes. You need to take back the territory and restore order.

Fighters willing to do that are frustrated that the U.S., so far, won't help them.

It's a White House decision.

MOUSTAFA: It is a White House decision, and it always has been. And I think the White House is slowly moving in the right direction.

I can tell you that the policy the White House has right now, if it had this policy three years ago, there would have never been an ISIS. We probably would have gotten rid of Assad.

GRIFFIN: U.S.-led coalition air strikes have now begun targeting ISIS locations attacking the oil facilities and even grain silos.

But as long as ISIS controls any ground where civilians can be taxed, extorted and robbed, ISIS will remain self-financed.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BANFIELD: Self-funded. Drew Griffin joining me live now from CNN Center.

Drew, does anybody know how much is actually makes in one day, and how much ISIS actually needs to operate?

GRIFFIN: If I was to be perfectly honest with you, I would say the answer is no. This is a criminal enterprise, Ashleigh. U.S. Treasury tries to track this. They believe it's about a million dollars a day coming in.

But when you start asking the follow-up questions, they really don't have a clue. And that's because so much of this is built on crimes, thuggery, taking over of property that they don't really have a handle on it because as you said in your previous conversations about air strikes, we don't have people on the ground. We don't have the human intelligence telling us this.

GRIFFIN: Oil smuggling sometimes is also referred to as the world's oldest profession. But is this really all ISIS?

GRIFFIN: This oil smuggling has been going on for years and years and years. Being on that border with Turkey, I tell you, it is extremely porous. There's a lot of small, rinky-dink kind of oil smuggling operations there, and such bad gas that's coming across, you can actually smell smuggled gas being burned in a car.

It's not all ISIS. ISIS took advantage of it while it could. And now some of those facilities has been bombed. That's gotten rid of.

But ISIS will adapt, and that's what they're doing right now, Ashleigh.

GRIFFIN: Just what we were just talking about before you came on, the adaptability of this foe.

Drew Griffin, great work as usual. Nice to see you, sir. Thank you.

The Dallas apartment where a man who had Ebola stayed, it has been cleaned up. But all at the same time while other residents, including children, were nearby.

What's wrong with that picture? Was that actually safe? What we found, coming up.

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