The USS Cole: Al Qaeda’s Strike Before 9/11

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Joining us to discuss the USS Cole tragedy and his efforts to tell that story via documentary is USS Cole Commander Kirk Lippold.

Commander, thank you so much for joining us today.

Absolutely, Georgian.

Wouldn't miss it for the world.

So tell us about this new docuseries that you've come out with.

What's it about?

And what are you hoping to achieve with it?

Well, I think what you're really looking at is first and foremost, thank you to the Daily Wire for supporting it and also big media for actually producing it.

The real goal of the documentary was to really highlight for the American people what happened to USS Coal 25 years ago when it was attacked by al-Qaeda terrorists and what put us in that port in Aden, Yemen to begin with.

I mean, clearly it was 11 months before 9-11.

And when the attack occurred, one of the things I'm most proud of and want to highlight for the American people is the heroism of my crew as they saved that ship.

and saved our shipmates.

So tell us, a lot of people don't know this story of the USS Coal.

This happened 25 years ago, almost to the day, and it was somewhat overshadowed by the election that was going on at the time.

So can you tell us the story of the USS Cole?

Absolutely.

USS Cole was a U.S.

Navy Aegis-guided missile destroyer, homeported in Norfolk, Virginia.

We would deploy out of there in early August of 2000.

Our mission was to actually cross the Atlantic through the Mediterranean to go to the North Arabian Gulf and enforce United Nations sanctions in the country of Iraq.

But what happened is about halfway between the Mediterranean and the European theater, Central Command in the Middle East and the Fifth Fleet, we didn't have enough oilers in the Navy at the time.

We've got even fewer today.

And so we had to find a port to pull into.

So there were two ports, Djibouti on the west coast of Africa, Aden at the southwest corner of the Arabian Peninsula.

We pulled into Aden for what we expected was a six to eight hour brief stop for fuel.

We had been refueling for about 45 minutes as part of routine harbor operations.

We'd contracted for three garbage barges to come take off trash, plastic, and hazmet.

Two had come out and left.

We were expecting a third barge, and the third boat that came out to us had been brought into the country a year before us by al-Qaeda, and it looked exactly like the garbage barges.

So as it approached the ship, no one saw anything untoward.

Little did we know.

know that they had been observing Navy ships for almost a year.

And as that boat came alongside, alongside, it was actually two suicide bombers with explosives built into the boat that detonated, blowing a 40 by 40 foot hole in the side of the ship, instantly killing 17 sailors and wounding 37 others.

But as a real testament to the crew, we were able to get the ship stable in a little over an hour, despite the extensive damage.

And when it came to medical triage and care, that first day, we would have 33 wounded that we would get evacuated off the ship in about about 99 minutes into local hospitals and of those 33 32 would survive that's an incredible story now a 40-foot hole in a ship and you were able to stabilize it how did you do that

Well, one of the things we had done prior to pulling in was actually a damage control

and something you do every time you have an event like this where you're in a higher state of readiness because of the threat is we implement what's called a higher degree of watertight integrity.

In this case, all the compartments below the main deck, or what they call the damage control deck, were all sealed and compartmented off.

What that did was two things.

Number one, when the blast went off exterior to the ship and penetrated inward, number one, it prevented progressive flooding, kind of like if you remember Titanic, you went from compartment to compartment to compartment.

What that did was it prevented and contained the flooding within a few major compartments.

The second thing that it did that was really beneficial is because of that compartmentalization, it dissipated the force of the blast.

I mean, the pressure wall from the explosives that went off traveled at about 25,000 feet per second.

So the damage, the extensive damage that you see throughout the ship occurred in less than three milliseconds.

But because of that compartmentalization that we had put into place, that's what really minimized the extent of the damage, controlled the flooding, mitigated some of the horrific injuries that we saw.

But nonetheless, it was one of those events where the announcing system failed.

Nobody could tell the crew what had happened, where to go, what to do.

They fell back on their training and then accomplished what they needed to to save our ship and shipmates.

So in my mind, true heroes that this documentary will point out.

Now, this happened before 9-11, pretty shortly before 9-11, less than a year.

What was the degree of awareness about the threat of terrorism at that time?

Well, it's very interesting.

We knew that terrorism existed because, obviously, I mean, I personally had experienced it earlier in my career.

I was actually in the embassy in Beirut in 1983,

just a few days before they blew it up.

I lost a Naval Academy classmate in the Beirut barracks bombing that fall.

Of course, we had Cobar Tower.

in 1996, World Trade Center I in 1993.

And then, of course, the embassy bombings two years before Cole in Dar es Slaam, Tanzania, Nairobi, Kenya.

So Al-Qaeda had a pattern, especially with World Trade Center I and the embassy bombings.

What we didn't know, and the documentary points out, is that the FBI had actually interviewed one of the surviving al-Qaeda members from the terrorist attack against the embassies.

And when they interviewed him, he flat out told them, Al-Qaeda is going to target Navy ships pulling into Aden.

We never got that intelligence on the ship.

We never had any idea.

And I have no idea if the Navy leadership ever had access to that intelligence or ever did anything with it to prepare us prior to pulling into port.

Wow.

Now, one of the last remaining planners of the attack, the mastermind behind it, actually, was held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba for 20 years.

And he's just now getting his trial, or he will get it in June of next year.

Can you tell us a little bit about why it's taken so long for him to be tried?

Well,

one of the key things that I unfortunately need to point out is while a trial date is set, we've had trial dates set before.

His name is Al-Nashri, and he was the principal planner that put this entire thing together.

He worked very closely with bin Laden and Al-Zawahiri, who was the number two guy.

So this had been planned for a long time.

As a matter of fact, a gentleman named Khalad, the gentleman I use as a loose term, by the way, Khalad bought the explosives that al-Nashri would use when he built the boat that would attack USS Cole.

He is involved with the 9-11 planning as well.

So these guys are bad.

They're all tied together.

But at the end of the day, he's down in Guantanamo Bay, and we continue to have delays in taking him and holding him accountable for what he did.

Because, quite frankly, we lack the political will on both the Republican and Democrat sides to really make the defense teams stop issuing motion after motion, judges that continue to entertain them.

And we've had delay after delay.

And here we are at 20 years plus for a trial that should have gone on.

He should have been tried, found guilty, and then consequently, because it's a capital case, executed.

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Now, a few questions I want to return to, but first, how did they know that you were going to be in the port of Aden if that was just a game day decision to go there as opposed to Djibouti?

Were they prepared to follow you or were they just waiting for an opportunity at this port?

Well, number one, Cole was not targeted as a ship.

They were looking for the next Navy ship that had come in.

Aden had been a refueling port for about two years.

That had been negotiated between the ambassador in the country, Ambassador Bodine, and at the time, the fifth or the Central Command Commander, General Zinni, which then transitioned to General Franks.

And what you had was when we pulled in as the 27th ship to refuel in that port, there had been a routine that had been established.

Anytime a ship pulls into a port, what you have is they know pretty much where you need to refuel, what is available, what the threat levels are.

That's at a much higher level than most ships operate at.

So we were ordered into that port.

It wasn't like we said, hey, that looks like a good port to pull into and refuel.

We, in fact, were ordered to refuel in the port of Aden, Yemen.

And when we pulled in that morning, one of the unfortunate things that had happened is I submitted my force protection plan actually while I was in the Mediterranean.

We had no in-theater intel briefings at that time prior to pulling into Bahrain, which would be four days after I had refueled.

So we had somewhat of an intelligence gap there that later investigations would point out.

But when we pulled in that morning, There was absolutely no intelligence that we had that day that al-Qaeda had been there and operating.

We had worked through the embassy.

Nothing had come from them to indicate there was anything untoward.

NCIS does a port vulnerability assessment.

They indicated nothing was unsafe about the port.

And while overall we operated at a higher threat level, again, there was no credible intelligence.

to tell us that al-Qaeda had been there for a year, had already attempted attack on another ship nine months before us that we didn't know about.

And unfortunately, the same boat with the same explosives were used in the successful attack against us.

Now, how did this affect the general level of preparedness for terror going forward?

Obviously, 9-11 still went on to happen.

Would you say that they didn't raise the level of alert as high as they should have in response to this?

I think what you saw was the first thing the Navy tried to do was figure out how did this happen?

Why was the ship in that port to begin with?

Why didn't we have the intelligence?

I think that the question still has not been answered by anyone in either the intelligence community or clearly above me in the chain of command.

Why was that intelligence fed into the system by the FBI during that interview?

And why was nothing done by the chain of command to act on it when putting Navy ships into harm's way in a port that clearly had been targeted by al-Qaeda to go after Navy ships?

So it's one of the great unknowns.

But unfortunately, I lived and the crew lived and the families still live with the consequences that when we pulled in and were attacked, I lived through one administration with the Clinton administration that kept raising the bar and did nothing in response to that attack.

And by the same token, when the Bush administration came in, they took an attitude of we're forward-looking, not backward acting.

They did nothing.

And because of that,

that laid the groundwork for 9-11.

The fact that there was no response to attack on a U.S.

Navy ship, killing 17 sailors and wounding 37, really, in many ways, according to the 9-11 report, incensed bin Laden.

And he said, okay, if they won't even react to this, then clearly we've got a straight path to 9-11.

And unfortunately, 11 months later, the nation paid a very heavy price that we are still many ways paying for today.

Now, you mentioned that the crew sprang into action even without a proper announcement on the ship.

Just for our listeners, can you paint a picture of maybe one or two examples of some really impressive things?

Just so people can get an image of what it was like that day on the ship.

You can tell your story or maybe one or two examples from crew members that did things that were particularly heroic.

I think that might be really interesting for people to hear.

Absolutely.

The one that I'll point out in particular is a young Signalman second class Figueroa.

He was in the mess decks area, mess line area, trying to rescue people out of there and heard someone calling from down below in one of the spaces that was flooding.

And when he went down, not one, but two decks into flood waters that were surging around his ankles and rapidly rising.

And that space was eventually going to completely flood.

A young man was trapped behind the desk, critically wounded, broken leg, other injuries.

He managed to pull him out and then literally get him pushed up.

two sets of ladders or stairs and get him rescued and saved his life.

So, I mean, flood waters coming around.

I've got sailors saving them.

I had another one where a young woman, literally two compound fractures to her femurs, trapped in the wreckage, and two sailors were able to pry back.

And I had one of my officers reach down and said, I know this is going to hurt, but I need you to do it on the count of three.

And he pulled her out with those two legs broken and again, got her to triage, stabilized her.

We would evacuate her off the ship.

And again, she is alive today.

So we really had some heroic efforts going on that day and those critical minutes afterwards.

And again, I attribute that to my heroes and the crew because they took the initiative to do that in that moment.

And they're the ones that truly saved our ship and shipmates.

Now, how did that affect morale among the sailors seeing such a muted reaction to such a devastating loss of life?

What kind of message did it send that both Democrat and Republican administrations were somewhat disinterested in getting to the bottom of what happened?

I think it did have an effect on morale because they felt like, wait a minute, we're we're supposed to be defending freedom out there for our nation.

But by the same token, when something happens and lives are lost, when we have the political leadership and to a degree, the military leadership as well saying do nothing to demand a response to it, they're kind of wondering exactly what's going on here.

I mean, it's one thing for us to volunteer.

you know, to serve our nation and defend our constitution and way of life, but it's another thing for me to sacrifice my life and nothing's done as a result.

And it's been particularly frustrating, especially for the families who lost loved ones, to see no accountability when it comes to holding those responsible for this attack, which was bin Laden, his followers, and everything else.

And while, yes, we have taken out several members that were involved in that chain through drone strikes, obviously post-9-11 in Afghanistan with the military force, we still have that guy, Al-Nashri, down in Gitmo, who really is enjoying a fairly decent quality of life, gets three meals a day, gets to pray five times a day, and it just drags on and on.

So justice delayed is justice denied.

And I think people overall in the military see this, but they still want to have people that did this held responsible for their actions.

We've had 20 years to process the evidence scene, and we continue to even do it today.

I mean, the FBI and their forensics lab in Quantico, Virginia, and now the explosives lab that's down in Huntsville, Alabama.

They continue to process little items of evidence, continuing to tie people like al-Nashri and others to that crime, now an act of war, so that we can hold them accountable.

All right.

Well, Commander Lippold, this has been so wonderful having you.

And I think our audience is going to be very interested to watch this.

Thank you for coming on.

Absolutely.

Thank you.

And thank you again to Daily Wire and to Big Media for really telling a story of heroism that the American people don't know about, and now they'll get the opportunity to.