It's become extremely difficult to speak to active ISIS members now. I was speaking to them in 2015, and the last one was killed in a drone strike.

It's become extremely difficult to speak to active ISIS members now. I was speaking to them in 2015, and the last one was killed in a drone strike.

The systemic failure in the media in covering ISIS is that the majority of reporters are doing it in a semaphore fashion.

If we cover a court case involving a murderer, we would still seek out the side of that murderer, even as we realize that what people say is going to be self-serving.

One of ISIS' biggest propaganda coups was the beheadings of the aid workers and journalists. Is [Emni], the group that is exporting fighters overseas, also the one that was holding James Foley and John Cantlie and Kayla Mueller?

I'm really curious as to the actual structure of the Emni [the intelligence unit that handles foreign attacks]. And Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, the head of it. There are so few pictures of him. We don't even really know what he looks like. For somebody with this outsized influence projecting murder abroad, you'd think that we would know a lot more by now. And then the role of the hostages.

They're implementing what was the strategy of Al Qaeda, which was to have attacks of different levels simultaneously. ... So the idea is, on the one hand you have these spectacular attacks that take months to plan, and others like Reda Hame, a French national, who went to Syria and was there for about a week, given a couple of days of target practice and one day of encryption training, sent back and arrested almost immediately.