Mike Adams analyzes Project Freedom, launched February 28th by Donald Trump, as a deliberate provocation involving 100 aircraft escorting tankers through the Strait of Hormuz to justify war. He argues the strait lies within Iran's territorial limits, making the operation a trap using commercial vessels as human shields to bypass congressional approval for a 60-day conflict. Despite failed sanctions and domestic uprisings, this escalation risks severe global shortages and famine by 2027, underscoring the urgent need for peace over military defeat. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
Time
Text
Trump's Project Freedom in Hormuz00:13:13
Okay, so Trump has announced Project Freedom.
What a name, right?
Project Freedom is, well, it begins today, by the way, and it's an effort to, as Trump claims, to escort ships out of the Persian Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz.
And these are tanker vessels that would be escorted through the Strait of Hormuz.
And apparently, there are going to be, 100 aircraft involved in this.
I don't know how many ships are going to be involved.
Basically, this is, it looks like an effort to provoke a response from Iran in order to justify a reignition of a much larger war, a larger attack on Iran.
So, essentially, the way I see it, Trump is provoking Iran or actually just daring Iran, like, we dare you to attack us as we escort ships through the Strait of Hormuz.
Now, the Strait of Hormuz, you know, the Strait is called International Waters by Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio and probably Trump as well.
But according to maritime definitions, it's not really because every nation has 12 miles from its shore of water that it controls.
It's considered its own territory.
It's 12 miles.
And it turns out that the Strait of Hormuz is so narrow.
That when you combine Iran's 12 miles and Oman's 12 miles, that covers the entire strait.
And so there really isn't a segment of the strait that you could call international waters, even though it has functioned as such for quite a long time, you know, until this war started, that Trump started this war February 28th.
And it's only after that that the strait became, quote, closed in response to Trump's attack on Iran.
So the northern portion of the Strait of Hormuz is clearly within Iran's territorial borders.
Waters.
There's no question about that.
Just look at a map.
And the southern portion of the strait is believed to have been mined.
And so ships may be forced to use the northern portion of the strait, putting them well within range of Iran's drones or missiles or maybe even slingshots.
It's going to be that close.
So the question is what ships exactly does Trump plan to use to escort?
These other tankers out of the Strait of Hormuz.
It's also a little bit hilarious that Trump is calling it a humanitarian operation, given that this is the same Trump who said we're going to end a civilization.
You know, Trump supporting genocide, supporting the bombs in the hands of the IDF to bomb women and children in the hospitals in Gaza, and Trump that has approved the bombing of civilian infrastructure.
In Iran, and said he's going to bomb all the power plants, etc.
I mean, these are widely recognized by treaties and also under previous war crimes tribunals' laws that resulted from that.
These are all recognized as war crimes, by the way, and Trump often openly brags about them.
So to say that all of a sudden we're on a humanitarian mission, not a lot of people are going to buy that.
But that's the cover story, I guess, to say that this is humanitarian, not military.
Well, But we also know that the U.S. military under Trump is very deceitful.
For example, the U.S. will pretend to have negotiations and then will bomb and kill the negotiators or have Israel do so.
So, what if this is just a way for the U.S. to sneak U.S. Navy vessels into the Persian Gulf as part of an attack plan by claiming, oh, it's humanitarian?
Well, that would mean that the U.S. Navy would be using civilian commercial tankers as human shields in order to wage an attack against Iran.
Is that the plan?
Well, who knows?
I suppose we'll find out sooner or later, but that could be the plan.
It would be consistent with the way the U.S. has operated so far.
But here's the real question What do you suppose Iran will do in response to this?
Because Iran has said that no ships will pass without Iran's permission and consent.
And clearly, Iran has the capability to harass naval vessels or commercial ships.
And Iran has attacked and destroyed some commercial vessels that have tried to. transit the strait without Iran's permission.
So will Iran attack the commercial vessels?
Will Iran attack U.S. naval vessels?
Or will Iran do nothing?
Or will Iran maybe deploy more mines and wait for ships to hit the mines?
Who knows?
But the takeaway from this, in my analysis, is that Trump and the Pentagon are really getting desperate here.
They have not been able to force Iran to hand over control of the Strait of Hormuz to the United States of America.
And they probably never will, actually, just because of geography.
But they've failed in every effort they've tried.
They tried the financial attack with Scott Besant bragging about the financial terrorism against Iran, the currency attack.
They tried mass bombing.
We've all seen that.
Bombing power plants as well.
They've had economic sanctions.
They've, as Trump brags about, destroyed.
Iran's air force and navy, not that there was much of a navy to begin with, but they've tried everything they can think of.
They've tried having a domestic uprising with protesters.
You name it.
It's all been tried and none of it's working.
So as a result, right now, Iran is in a situation where it still has the leverage over the Strait of Hormuz.
So this is just the next desperate effort, it seems, by Trump and the Pentagon to try to Maybe to change the perception of this in the public eye, to try to present the United States as victims.
Oh, we're only there for humanitarian reasons.
It has nothing to do with an attempt to destroy Iran's government and overthrow the country and take all their oil.
No, no, no.
All of a sudden now we're little angels, little naval angels floating around just trying to save innocent people.
That's us, the United States Navy.
Again, I don't think anybody's going to buy it.
Clearly, if the United States Navy wanted to achieve a humanitarian release of all of those vessels out of the Persian Gulf, then the Navy would just leave.
They would leave because Iran will allow the vessels to leave, to sail out of there under Iran's control.
They've already said that.
Iran has no benefit from forever blocking the strait, they just want to control it.
And they want to charge a toll for tanker ships from certain countries to pay, you know, a million dollars or whatever it is, maybe two million dollars to transit the strait.
And then all the oil would begin to flow again.
But the U.S. Navy, specifically Trump and Hegseth, they don't want Iran to have control at all.
And so they think that through this mechanism, they can try war one more time.
They can goad Iran into attacking ships.
And then they can respond with maybe landing troops or bombing the bejesus out of Iran one more time.
Or who knows?
What their plans are.
But it's certainly not humanitarian.
It's the opposite of humanitarian.
So this is just the U.S. pretending to be in favor of freedom.
You know, they always brag about freedom of navigation.
And then the very next day, Trump will brag about, we're pirates.
We just take their ships and board them and steal the oil just like pirates.
That's an actual quote.
I mean, parts of that are an actual quote from Trump.
He bragged about the U.S. Navy operating as pirates.
The U.S. doesn't believe in freedom of navigation.
Not for anyone else.
Only for the U.S.
The U.S. doesn't believe in freedom for other countries or sovereignty for other countries.
Only believes that countries should be obedient to the American empire and nothing else.
So to call this humanitarian, to call it Project Freedom, is kind of a slap in the face of logic and reason and recent history as well.
But it'll probably sell to the Fox News audience, the kind of brainwashed MAGA supporters that are still out there that don't.
Think critically or read any kind of independent media.
You know, you could throw this across Fox News and probably fool a lot of people into thinking that we're the good guys and all our ships are in the Middle East because we're humanitarians.
That's just not the case at all.
And you know, one more question.
U.S. aircraft carriers clearly won't get close to Iran's shoreline because, well, it seems like they've been getting hit.
I don't think that was a laundry room fire on the USS. Gerald R. Ford, either.
So, what ships is the U.S. going to send exactly into the strait?
That's not clear, and Trump didn't say, and nobody's talking about that, so I don't know.
We'll have to wait and see.
But whatever ships they are, it seems to me that Trump and Hegseth are sending U.S. sailors into the strait as bait, hoping that they get killed.
So that they can have a reason to start a new 60-day war under the War Powers Act so that they don't need congressional approval to wage another 60 days of war.
But using U.S. sailors as bait is, you know, extremely unethical.
It's horrific.
And it could very well cost many U.S. sailors their lives.
It could be dozens or even hundreds of sailors could lose their lives if a U.S. ship is actually destroyed in the strait.
But it seems to me that's exactly what Hegseth and Trump are looking for here.
And that's sad.
In the meantime, the oil shortage on a global scale keeps getting worse.
And if the strait is not open for business soon, within the next few weeks, the consequences of the ongoing oil shortages and gas shortages and helium and so on are going to become really dire.
It's going to get a whole lot worse from here forward.
So let's all pray for peace and let's hope that this situation gets resolved.
And let's hope that Trump may finally have some people around him who will talk some sense into him and say, you know, this is a bad idea to try to defeat Iran militarily or to land troops or to use our sailors as bait or whatever.
These are horrible ideas.
Why not sit down and actually just be willing to compromise with Iran?
But.
You know, Trump's not willing to compromise at all.
At least that's become apparent recently.
So that's not a way out of this, unfortunately.
So stay tuned.
We'll see where this goes in the meantime.
You can follow my work at brightvideos.com, and my articles are at naturalnews.com.
And you can support us at healthrangerstore.com.
So thank you for your support.
I'll do my best to keep you informed, and I'll do my best to keep calling for peace, too, through all of this.
That's what's going to help.
The whole world is to have peace and let the oil flow again and the fertilizer flow again so we can maybe stave off the worst projections of famine and mass starvation that are approaching.
You know, 2027 is going to be a very bad year if we don't get the fertilizer flowing again very, very soon.
So keep that in mind and thank you for listening.
Take care.
Lab Tested Low Acid Coffee00:00:10
Start your day right with our organic hand roasted whole bean coffee.
Low acid, smooth and bold, lab tested and ethically sourced.
Taste the difference only at healthrangerstore.com.