Exaggerated, lacking evidence: Fact-checking Trump’s justifications for attacking Iran

Washington: US President Donald Trump, in announcing a military campaign against Iran, asserted he had done so because of “imminent threats” posed by the regime.

On Saturday (Washington time), he laid out his justifications in an eight-minute video he shared on social media. But three of his key claims were inaccurate. Here’s a fact-check.

What Trump said: “In 2000, [Iran] knew and were probably involved with the attack on the USS Cole.”

This lacks evidence. Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for the October 2000 attack on the US destroyer Cole, and US intelligence agencies have concurred.

There is no public evidence that Iran was directly responsible for the attack. But for years, US courts have ordered Iran to pay tens of millions of dollars in damages to victims of the attack and their survivors, finding that Iran “facilitated” the attack by providing material and financial support to al-Qaeda.

The FBI, on its website detailing the history of the attack, notes that the agency “ultimately determined that members of the al-Qaeda terrorist network planned and carried out the bombing.” It makes no mention of Iran. Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a citizen of Saudi Arabia, is accused of organising the attack and is awaiting trial at Guantanamo Bay.

A federal judge ruled in 2015 that Iran was complicit, noting that the country’s support for al-Qaeda made it capable of carrying out the attack on Cole and that one of the masterminds most likely travelled through Iran before and after the bombing. The case was brought by the family of a sailor killed in the attack against Iran and Sudan; neither country responded to the lawsuit.

In a similar civil case, a federal judge ruled in 2024 that Iran “facilitated the planning and execution of the attack on the Cole” through decades of material support to al-Qaeda.

What Trump said: “That is why, in Operation Midnight Hammer last June, we obliterated the regime’s nuclear program at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan.”

This is exaggerated. The US last June carried out airstrikes targeting Iran’s nuclear facilities, but government reports and other officials have not gone as far as Trump’s claims of total destruction.

The New York Times reported in the days after the attack that a preliminary assessment found that the strikes had sealed off the entrances to two of Iran’s facilities but had not collapsed their underground buildings.

John Ratcliffe, the CIA director, said last June that Iran’s nuclear program had been “severely damaged” by the airstrikes. Rafael Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told CBS that same month that the strikes caused “severe damage, but it’s not total damage.” And a Pentagon spokesperson echoed that language in July, telling reporters that the strikes had “severely degraded” Iran’s capability and set back the program by two years.

The administration, too, took a more muted approach in assessing the damage. In the National Security Strategy, published last November with an introduction by the president, officials stated that the June airstrikes “significantly degraded Iran’s nuclear program.”

What Trump said: “Instead, they attempted to rebuild their nuclear program and to continue developing long-range missiles that can now threaten our very good friends and allies in Europe, our troops stationed overseas and could soon reach the American homeland.”

This lacks evidence. Officials with access to US intelligence told the Times this past week that “Mr Trump exaggerated the immediacy of the threat posed to the United States” by Iran’s missile program. The suggestion that Iran was trying to build a nuclear bomb was also unsupported.

Trump is correct that the country’s current missile arsenal could reach parts of Europe and US military bases in the Middle East, but experts and official reports doubt that Iran’s missiles could reach the United States. According to a 2025 report from the Defence Intelligence Agency, Iran did not have intercontinental ballistic missiles that could reach the United States, though it could develop 60 such weapons by 2035.

There is also little evidence that Iran is trying to build a bomb.

Grossi told a French news network this past week that his agency had not seen evidence that Iran had plans to produce a nuclear weapon.

Officials also told the Times this past week that Iran had not built new nuclear sites since the June attacks, though recent activity had been detected at existing sites. Nor was there evidence that Iran was trying to dig out its stash of enriched uranium.

“There is no imminent threat,” Daryl G. Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association, wrote in a recent journal article. “Iran is not close to ‘weaponising’ its nuclear material so as to justify another US attack.”