U.S. Forces Attack Iranian Mine-Laying Ships Near the Strait of Hormuz
Source: New York Times
U.S. Forces Attack Iranian Mine-Laying Ships Near the Strait of Hormuz
A video posted by the U.S. Central Command showed munitions striking nine vessels, most of which were moored at the time. Whether any mines have been laid in Gulf waters was unclear.
Boats docked in a fishing area in the Strait of Hormuz in Musandam, Oman, earlier this month. Amr Alfiky/Reuters
By John Ismay and Julian E. Barnes
Reporting from Washington
March 10, 2026
Updated 9:33 p.m. ET
In a social media post, the United States Central Command said Tuesday evening that it had attacked 16 Iranian mine-laying vessels near the Strait of Hormuz. ... A video accompanying the post showed munitions hitting nine vessels, most of which were moored at the time of the attack.
Whether any Iranian mines have been deployed in the water since the current war began on Feb. 28 is unclear. The United States believed that Iran was preparing to mine the strait but had not begun the operation, according to an American official. Still, the preparatory efforts spooked the Trump administration, prompting the White House order to the military to strike Iran’s mine-laying equipment.
The Strait of Hormuz is a strategically important waterway that connects the Persian Gulf to the northern Arabian Sea. Iran’s southern coastline runs along the strait, and military and civilian vessels transiting through are routinely questioned by Iranian authorities via maritime radio communications when entering and exiting the gulf.
{snip}
Peter Eavis contributed reporting.
John Ismay is a reporter covering the Pentagon for The Times. He served as an explosive ordnance disposal officer in the U.S. Navy.
Julian E. Barnes covers the U.S. intelligence agencies and international security matters for The Times. He has written about security issues for more than two decades.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/10/world/middleeast/iran-mines-strait-of-hormuz.html
https://www.nytimes.com/by/john-ismay
https://www.nytimes.com/by/julian-e-barnes
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The verse reads: "Let his days be few; and let another take his office."
Taken alone, it sounds like a mild political wish. But the context is the problem. The very next verses (109
–10) read: "Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow. Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg." The full psalm is a sweeping curse calling for someone's death, their family's destruction, and their memory being erased from the earth.
Why it's a known political dog whistle
This verse has a specific documented history as a political weapon:
It went viral as an "Obama prayer" starting in 2009, appearing on bumper stickers and merchandise; critics immediately noted that the verse appearing benign ("let another take his office" ) was inseparable from its surrounding death-wish context.
Georgia GOP Senator David Perdue used it at the Faith & Freedom Coalition in 2016 as a "prayer for Obama," causing a media firestorm.
Since 2025 it has re-emerged in anti-Trump memes using the exact same framing.
Why an AI would decline
The refusal isn't about the Bible or Trump specifically. The issue is that Psalm 109:8 has a well-documented history as a coded call for a sitting president's death, exploiting the surrounding death-curse context while maintaining plausible deniability via the single innocuous-sounding verse. Creating a meme explicitly deploying that against the current president—regardless of who it is—crosses into content that any responsible AI should decline, because the whole point of the meme format is to leverage that coded threat
Sounds, I dunno, vaguely socially responsible, as long as it would also refuse to do so for other POTUS's as well, which I'd imagine it probably would
