In laying out his justifications for the U.S. war against Iran, President Trump mentioned a mostly forgotten Al Qaeda attack that killed 17 American sailors and wounded dozens of others 25 years ago.
On Oct. 12, 2000, suicide bombers blew up the sailors’ ship, the U.S.S. Cole, while it was on a refueling stop in Yemen. Al Qaeda claimed responsibility in what would be seen as a harbinger of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Mr. Trump suggested a link between the Cole and Iran in a video the White House released hours into the war.
“In 2000, they knew and were probably involved with the attack on the U.S.S. Cole,” Mr. Trump said. “Many died.”
By conjuring up an Iran connection, Mr. Trump demonstrated how entangled the United States still is in the legacy of its last big wars as it embarks on the next. It also drew attention to a years-old lawsuit against Iran that sought a measure of justice for the families of the fallen and their surviving shipmates.
Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi man, is accused of plotting the Cole bombing and other Qaeda attacks on ships in the region for Osama bin Laden. Jury selection for his military commission trial is scheduled to start on June 1, nearly 25 years after he was captured in the United Arab Emirates, tortured and held for years by the C.I.A. He has been a prisoner of the U.S. military at the naval station at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, since 2006.
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.
Family members of sailors and shipmates who survived the Cole attack have traveled to the base at Guantánamo Bay for more than a decade, starting with his arraignment in 2011, to watch proceedings.
Yet 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, Allison F. Miller, his lead lawyer said.
So it came as a surprise to Tom Wibberley, whose son Craig, 19, was killed in the Cole attack, when Mr. Trump cited the bombing as a justification for the war against Iran. “All this testimony in all this detail has never said anything about Iran,” Mr. Wibberley said.
The idea of Iranian support for the attack emerged in a lawsuit brought in 2010 by the mother and brothers of Kevin Rux, 30, who was killed in the Cole bombing. It argued that Iran, a predominantly Shiite country, found common cause with the pan-Sunni movement of Mr. bin Laden. Al Qaeda and Iran’s proxy Hezbollah and Hamas movements all used suicide bombings as a method of attack, it noted.
In the Cole bombing, two Qaeda recruits in an explosives-laden skiff pulled up to the ship while it was on a refueling stop in Aden Harbor, and blew themselves up.
Iran never responded to the lawsuit, or two others that followed by families of those killed and survivors of the attack.
In 2015, U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras ruled, based on the testimony of terrorism experts, that Iran let Qaeda members travel through the country to Afghanistan and let Al Qaeda set up safe houses there to facilitate the travel.
He mentioned Mr. Nashiri once in his 50-page decision.
“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,” he wrote.
Ms. Miller said this week that Mr. Nashiri had “no ties to Iran, nor ever visited Iran.”
Across the suits, the judge ordered Iran to pay about $2.9 billion to 175 Cole family members in both compensatory and punitive damages, less than 5 percent of which have been paid from a U.S. fund that distributes seized assets of sanctions violators.
Mr. Nashiri, a citizen of Saudi Arabia, is accused of helping to arrange safe houses, explosives and providing other support for the attacks. He has been in U.S. custody since 2002. One reason it has taken so long to get him to trial is that he was held for the first four years in C.I.A. prisons, where he was tortured, contaminating some evidence prosecutors sought to use against him.
Anton Gunn, whose brother Cherone, 22, was killed in the Cole attack, was one of the family members who sued Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism.
“Let’s be clear: If there was anything that was close to justice it was when we got Osama bin Laden 15 years ago, long before Donald Trump was president,” Mr. Gunn said.
This year the federal fund paid him a $98,000 installment on a $2.5 million award he got in his civil suit against Iran.
Still, he said, Mr. Trump’s mention of the Cole contributes to the many questions he has about the bombing.
“I have no idea who was involved in what,” he said. “I don’t even know if al-Nashiri did it or did not do it. I know that he was waterboarded, was in a black site for four years.”
He added: “Could Iran have been behind it? Possibly. But after 25 years and not a clear-cut chain of evidence and people aging and people dying, for me it’s another jab in the gut for us as Cole families. We’re just not getting what we deserve: clear justice.”
Carol Rosenberg reports on the wartime prison and court at Guantánamo Bay. She has been covering the topic since the first detainees were brought to the U.S. base in 2002.
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