Trump says Iran was linked to the USS Cole attack: a federal judge also ruled Iran was complicit

President Donald Trump has repeatedly argued that the Iranian regime bears some responsibility for the terrorist suicide bombing of the USS Cole in 2000. The president has gotten pushback from some in the press, but a federal judge has repeatedly agreed with him.

In an oft-forgotten terror attack, al-Qaeda terrorists bombed the U.S. Navy guided-missile destroyer USS Cole in October 2000 — less than a year before 9/11 — killing 17 U.S. sailors and wounding dozens more. Abd al Rahim Hussayn Muhammad al Nashiri was a top associate of Osama bin Laden and the alleged mastermind of the attack against the U.S. naval ship parked in the waters off the Yemeni coast, and this summer he will likely face a military trial at Guantánamo Bay for his role in the bombing.

Trump has repeatedly cited the attack in recent days as part of the U.S. justification for strikes against Iran — saying the Iranian regime had likely been aware of and involved in the plot — although multiple journalists contend this is not true.

But in lawsuits brought in U.S. federal court by victims and family members of the terrorist bombing in the Gulf of Aden more than two and a half decades ago, an Obama-appointed judge has repeatedly held the Iranian regime at least partly responsible for the suicide attack, due to the extensive assistance Iran had provided to al-Qaeda in the 1990s.

Trump counts Cole bombing as part of Iran’s 47 years of terror

“For 47 years, the Iranian regime has chanted "Death to America" and waged an unending campaign of bloodshed and mass murder, targeting the United States, our troops, and the innocent people in many, many countries,” Trump said in his Feb. 28 video on Truth Social announcing the commencement of U.S. strikes against the Iranian regime and its military. He added: "In 2000, they knew and were probably involved with the attack on the USS Cole. Many died."

Trump doubled down on this in remarks to the press on Monday. “They [the Iranians] have been doing this for 47 years — killing people for 47 years,” the president said. “The USS Cole, where they were involved — very strongly. They always denied it, but they were very strongly involved."

This brought pushback from some members of the media. “Trump repeated his claim that Iran ‘was involved very strongly’ in the USS Cole bombing in 2000. "However [...] the U.S. long ago determined al-Qaeda was responsible for the attack, and has actually held the accused mastermind at Guantánamo for 24 years,” Abigail Hauslohner, the U.S. foreign affairs correspondent for the Financial Times, tweeted Monday.

Andrew Feinberg, the White House correspondent for The Independent, tweeted Monday that “@realDonaldTrump appears to blame Iran for the 2000 attack on USS Cole, which was found to have been carried out by al-Qaeda.”

Links between al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and the Iranian regime

Last week, New York Times reporter Carol Rosenberg had also suggested that Trump was “conjuring up an Iran connection.”

Despite the differences, the Iranian regime has a long history — both before and after 9/11 — of collaborating with al-Qaeda. The DOJ and U.S. investigators have pointed to links between al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and the Iranian regime during the pre-9/11 era, and the State Department and other agencies have repeatedly lamented over many years that Iran has continued to shield al-Qaeda operatives inside their country after 9/11.

Federal courts in the U.S. have also concluded that Iran used al-Qaeda as a tool against the U.S. before 9/11 and later assisted the terrorist group and the Taliban in their successful efforts to evict the U.S. from Afghanistan.

Regarding the attack on the USS Cole, Judge Rudolph Contreras — appointed by then-President Barack Obama to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in 2012 — has ruled at least three times that the Iranian regime had “complicity” in the deadly al-Qaeda bombing which killed and injured scores of American sailors.

Just the News reported late last month, as war between the United States and Iran loomed, that the Shiite theocratic Iranian regime continued to shield one of the leaders of the Sunni jihadist terrorist group responsible for the 9/11 attacks, with the FBI's "Most Wanted" Saif al-Adel running the global terror network under Tehran's protection.

Judge says Iranian regime had “complicity” in al-Qaeda’s bombing of the Cole

Judge Contreras detailed the close pre-9/11 relationship between al-Qaeda and the Iranian regime in a 2015 lawsuit ruling.

“In the 1990s, al-Qaeda was able to deepen relationships with Iranian officials and Hezbollah. Al-Qaeda also used Iran as a ‘transit point’ for moving money and fighters,” the judge wrote. “In the years leading up to the Cole bombing, Iran was directly involved in establishing al-Qaeda’s Yemen network and supported training and logistics for al-Qaeda in the Gulf region. Throughout, Iran used Lebanese Hezbollah, long-trusted yet easily distanced in public, as its primary ‘facilitator’ for providing training and communications support.”

The judge added that “at the time of the bombing of the Cole, the links between the Iranian defendants and Bin Laden and al-Qaeda were firmly established: Iran was actively tied to al-Qaeda in the years when the attack on USS Cole was being planned and when it was executed.”

“Initial reports indicated the bomb used for the USS Cole attack bears similarities to shaped bombs designed by Hizballah, and it is possible that al-Qaeda learned such techniques when training in Lebanon in the early 1990s,” the judge assessed. Contreras also found that “Iran supported al-Qaeda as an organization and made it stronger overall, and this made al-Qaeda better able to carry out terrorist attacks such as the USS Cole bombing” as he argued that “this support is not consistent or unqualified, but over the years it has helped make al-Qaeda a formidable organization.”

The judge went on to rule that the Iranian regime was indeed complicit in the al-Qaeda attack in 2000.

“In light of the evidence of the Iranian … defendants’ conspiracy to support the terrorist activities of al-Qaeda, which ultimately executed the Cole bombing, joint and several liability for all damages is appropriate,” Contreras ruled. The Obama appointee added: “As a result of Iran’s complicity, it is likely that Abd Rahim Hussayn Muhammad al Nashiri, one of the masterminds of the attack on the Cole, traveled through Iran when moving between Yemen and Afghanistan both before and after the bombing.”

Contreras reached much the same conclusion when he ruled against the Iranian regime in 2023 in favor of the USS Cole's bombing victims' families.

“Plaintiffs have established that Iran intended to injure the sailors aboard the Cole when it provided material support and resources to Bin Laden and al-Qaeda,” the judge said. “Thus, Plaintiffs have carried their burden to show that the consequences of Iran’s act were reasonably certain, and the sole question for this Court is the damages amount.” Contreras again ruled against Iran in 2024.

“The Court concludes that Plaintiffs have established Iran’s liability,” the judge found. “The Court agrees with its finding that satisfactory evidence establishes that Iran’s provision of financial, training, and travel support to Bin Laden and al-Qaeda facilitated the planning and execution of the attack on the Cole.”

Nashiri’s defense lawyer denies that her client has been to Iran

Allison Miller, Nashiri's defense lawyer, told The New York Times last week that her terrorist client had “no ties to Iran, nor ever visited Iran.” The outlet said that Miller had said that “any link he might have had to Iran has never come up in more than a decade of pretrial hearings or in hundreds of thousands of pages of evidence that prosecutors have turned over to Mr. Nashiri’s defense team.”

It was also reported that “his lawyers, who are paid by the Pentagon to defend him, formally asked prosecutors this week to disclose any U.S. intelligence supporting the president’s assertion.” The outlet said the defense lawyers argued that “prosecutors have offered up no evidence supporting a link that the president claimed between Iran and the attack in Yemen in 2000.”

Nashiri’s lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Just the News. Nashiri’s lawyers reportedly presented the chief prosecutor with an offer in 2024 for their client to plead guilty in exchange for avoiding the death penalty.

The Department of War confirmed on Tuesday that Nashiri’s trial is slated to begin at the start of June.

The case against Nashiri

The charging sheet against Nashiri, issued by the Office of Military Commissions in 2011, lays out the host of crimes that the Saudi-born al-Qaeda operative is accused of, including using treachery or perfidy, murder in violation of the law of war, attempted murder in violation of the law of war, terrorism, conspiracy, intentionally causing serious bodily injury, attacking civilians, attacking civilian objects, and hijacking or hazarding a vessel or aircraft.

The waterborne suicide attack by al-Qaeda proved a morbid warning of the terror group’s potency less than a year before it hijacked planes and killed nearly 3,000 people on Sept. 11, 2001. The suspected mastermind, Saudi-born Nashiri, is being held in Guantánamo Bay and still hasn’t been tried for his role.

The FBI page on the “USS Cole Bombing” says that “two suicide pilots of a small bomb-laden boat pulled alongside the USS Cole at midship, offered friendly gestures to several crew members, and detonated their explosives” on Oct. 12, 2000.

“The blast ripped a 40-foot-wide hole near the waterline of the Cole, killing 17 U.S. sailors and injuring nearly 40 other crew members,” the FBI said. “The extensive FBI investigation ultimately determined that members of the al Qaeda terrorist network planned and carried out the bombing.”

The bureau added: “The investigation also revealed that the USS Cole bombing followed an unsuccessful attempt on January 3, 2000, to bomb another U.S. Navy ship, the USS The Sullivans. In this earlier incident, the terrorist boat sank before the explosives could be detonated. However, the boat and the explosives were salvaged. The boat was then refitted, and the explosives were tested and reused in the USS Cole attack.”

9/11 trial remains stalled out

The Guantánamo Docket, a project of The New York Times, states that an estimated 15 detainees — including Nashiri as well as the alleged mastermind of 9/11 — remain at Gitmo out of the roughly 780 suspected terrorists who passed through the island detention center since 2002.

The Guantánamo Project says that, of the 15 remaining terrorists, nine have been charged with war crimes, with two convicted and seven yet to be put on trial, while three detainees are held in “indefinite law-of-war detention” and another three are held in “law-of-war detention but have been recommended for transfer with security arrangements to another country.”

In the nearly two and a half decades since 19 al-Qaeda terrorists crashed hijacked planes into the World Trade Center buildings, the Pentagon, and a field near Shanksville in Pennsylvania, killing nearly 3,000 people, the five men believed to be responsible for the planning and execution of the plot have yet to stand trial. The key question of whether confessions obtained by the FBI after their CIA custody should be admissible remains unresolved.

The defense teams are seeking to throw out confessions that the five men made to FBI “clean teams” at Guantánamo Bay after they had been subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques” — considered torture by some — at the CIA black sites.

KSM confessed to planning the 9/11 attacks in a March 2007 statement to the Combatant Status Review Tribunal, saying, “I was responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z."

The U.S. government alleges that the men in custody carried out a criminal conspiracy in planning and executing the 9/11 plot, and prosecutors listed the names of all 2,977 victims killed on 9/11 in the 90-page 2011 charging sheet. The five men, who were arraigned in 2012, were also charged with attacking civilians, hijacking, terrorism, violations of the rules of war, and more.

Biden offers leniency, appeals court rejects it

Republicans have also repeatedly and harshly criticized any deal with the 9/11 defendants which would have taken the death penalty off the table as the Biden administration spent years attempting to reach a plea deal with the terrorists.

Air Force Colonel Matthew McCall, a military judge handling the 9/11 case, ruled in November 2024 that Austin was not able to withdraw the plea deal which had been offered to the terrorists and agreed to by them. The judge ordered the plea deal proceedings to move forward.

The Pentagon, through the Justice Department, appealed this ruling, and first received a stay on the plea deals early last year. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia then sided with the Pentagon in a 2-1 ruling by a three-judge panel. The two appeals court judges vacated the military judge’s order, which had prevented Austin and then Hegseth from withdrawing from the plea deal, and the two judges prohibited the military judge from conducting hearings where the guilty pleas would be allowed to be entered.

Hegseth visited Guantánamo Bay in February of last year, where he said that he had seen the 9/11 defendants. “I saw them all […] I saw Khalid Sheikh Mohammed […] I hope he finds justice soon,” Hegseth told Fox News. “And it’s one of the rare things that I agree with my predecessor on, Lloyd Austin, that he deserves the death penalty. And I hope he finds it soon through that system.”