Multiple Iranian and Iraqi News Sites Seized by US DOJ and FBI

No, but I don't think "unless we hear it from an official who is still in power, we won't send anything despite knowing the Iranian people need help desperately" is the look we want as a nation. I mean, maybe they do. A lot of Americans have been far more isolationist than in the past, at least when they think their institutions are under attack. We're certainly more Russo and Sinophobic than we were even a decade ago. Trump fanned the Sinophobia with his "China virus," and the Democrats fan the flames with "Russia hacked the <insert political event>."

As for the Middle East, the US cares about Israel, and tourist spots, and the rest can burn like it does when we drop 26,000 bombs a year on it.

We can send vaccines, but it won't do much good if the Iranian military -- which I'm pretty sure takes orders from the Ayatollah, not from the widow of the deposed former Shah -- intercepts them at the border.

Unless you're proposing we invade?

Even making the offer would have been a significant step forward. At the very least, the US could have suspended its economic sanctions against Iran while they try to gather resources to combat the virus:

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_sanctions_against_Iran

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/worl...56a196-6aba-11ea-b199-3a9799c54512_story.html

Gee, why is Iran upset with the US? It is a mystery.

You have to go through an awful lot of gymnastics to get from that to "the U.S. is withholding vaccines from Iran." And given that, for most of 2020, the Iranian government's policy toward COVID-19 was plain old denial, it seems doubtful that U.S. actions could have changed very much.

I know, I know, America is always wrong. But there's a whole lot of reaching going on here.

America isn't always wrong, but I'm going to point out when it is, and if that includes bringing up shit it has done in the past to get to this point, then so be it. For the record, you don't have to be okay with the US continuing sanctions against a nation where its people are dying, nor do you need to find reasons to ameliorate the US' responsibility by saying Iran probably wouldn't have done anything to stop the virus anyway. That's some Grade A horseshit. If you don't care whether or not Iranians die, that's fine, but I suspect you do care, so don't cover for the US. Let its actions speak for it. They're often very loud, and very final.

Why the fuck would anyone defend the Iranian government?!?

The Iranian government can eat shit. I care about the Iranian people who are directly harmed by the US imposing sanctions in the midst of a pandemic. I care about the US choosing who to silence based on works best for them, and claiming all who speak through a news agency are propagandists whilst spreading its own propaganda through every medium on earth, in the same way they criticize others for human rights violations while building a body count of innocents and calling them enemy combatants after the fact. If all you get out of this is "defending the Iranian government," you're part of the problem.

These Iranian newsites got their .com mirrors taken down because they are as dishonest as Russia Today or Fox News...
There is no honest independent news organization in Iran...

If dishonesty were the metric for who gets to broadcast to the masses, the United States would finally be silent, and so would a great many other governments.

Sadly this is true.

Regimes are rarely the true victims of sanctions designed to target them. If anything it tends to encourage black markets which said regime can control and prosper from.

Sanctions = war crimes.

Completely agreed.

There are three necessary conditions for economic sanctions to work:

1) The economy of the sanctioned country must be sufficiently tied into the economies of the sanctioning countries (and those they have influence over) as to have major economic impacts.

2) The population must be well enough informed as to understand the cause of the economic impacts.

3) The population must have the ability to influence government policy.

The model for effective sanctions is apartheid South Africa. I would argue that while Iran isn’t as perfect a case that it still fits within the effective range.

Which is the textbook answer.

However the whole premise is dubious at best given the track record and holding South Africa up as the model is counter productive when the actual impact of the sanctions there is still in dispute even now. The best that we can objectively say is that the incompletely applied program of sanctions did not show any evidence of slowing the progress made.

They did, however, definitely cause hardship throughout the country for an extended period.

Whether it was in whole, or even part, the cause of that progress is not clear cut and the fact such a lukewarm (at best) case remains the poster child makes that all the more troublesome.

I will point out that things like the Magnistsky Act are sanctions that are designed to specifically target members of a particular government that are more than happy to commit crimes against humanity. I don't know how harmful they are to the members of a particular nation, but Putin was certainly willing to kill people in other countries to try and prevent such sanctions from being enacted against him.

Sanctions are war crimes. What astounding hyperbole.

Sanctions are a blunt edge tool that doesn't work to topple governments unless aligned with similar interests in the target state that have some ability to enact change. They worked against apartheid because white businessmen there were given an explicit economic reason to demand change in their community so they didn't have to make the argument only on moral grounds. While that sucks, it doesn't change why it worked.

In general however sanctions are the line in the sand - most can be gotten around in 2-3 years, but it does impact the economies of both the sanctioner and sanctionee. The sanctionee has to eat increased transportation and forced scarcity increasing prices. The sanctioner loses less, but the more the sanctions hurt that intended target the more likely they are also going to hurt the nation issuing the sanction. Yes, disparity of scale impacts this, but the basis works regardless.

Sanctions are a precursor to greater conflict, but can be used as a negotiating point moving forward, can indicate to a country what the international community thinks the boundaries are, and sometimes can head off significantly worse escalation based on misunderstood priorities.

But sure, a blanket declaration that all sanction are war crimes.

That seems reasonable.

It is reasonable. I don't have to find reasons why it's okay to allow innocent people to die in order to twist the arm of their government because that government goes against our interests. It is within my reason to understand that is cruel, and wrong.

Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4419179/

"Astounding hyperbole" indeed.

The problem is, pretty much nothing you're saying about it is true.

How does one critically evaluate when one can't know the author?

Oh, do go on. How many more posts till you're ranting about the deep state and the mainstream media like a good MAGAt? Are Congresspeople all pedophiles too?

Yep, that "firewall" does seem rather flimsy, but they don't pretend to be, eg. Iranian, and where required to, they are registered as foreign agents (eg. Russia). So it goes. "The US did it first" doesn't justify getting away with lying about where news is actually coming from.

It's not disinformation to say that these sites aren't actually American when they're pretending to be.

Not under FARA per se. News agencies that are transparent about what principals they represent are given a pass, which opens it up to charges of favoritism, but if the goal is transparency, seems like the system is working.

Nope, but that's an argument for requiring the BBC and (especially) Arab News to register, not for these "news" sites not to have to.

I mean you personally, the consumer. You can keep believing these sites were actually by brave American journalists standing up to the propaganda of the evil US empire in favor of poor defenseless Iran once they stamp themselves with the scarlet A if you want, but you don't get to dictate that everyone else should be denied the tools to see through that lie.

You put a lot of faith in the integrity of the United States that I do not share. That's about all we're going to reach on this.

True or false: the seized domains hosted sites that claimed to be American?

Having a .com does not mean you're claiming to be American or based in the United States.

From firsthand experience, PressTV and Al-Alam never hid the fact that they were Iranian centered news agencies.

What you're doing right now is finding a justification for overreach. It's like when a cop searches a car without permission because they "smelled marijuana."

PressTV's About Us page from the Wayback archive of June 21st before the seizure:

Was that the rationale?

There have been multiple studies found out about the humanitarian cost of sanctions to be fraudulent. Unsurprisingly, regimes under sanctions lie and manipulate statistics whenever they can to try to get the sanctions lifted.

For example, Amaris link includes a massive rise in child mortality in Iraq. That has been found to be not the case by multiple studies legitimately conducted after those events.

The difference? Saddam Hussein's government was not in charge when the most recent studies were conducted, and yes, those studies include the number of children from the time period covered by the first survey that Baghdad Bob manipulated.

When adjusted for the more recent studies, life expectancy in Iraq over this time moved from 57 to 70 years.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5717930/

The purpose of this article has been to discuss a major deception. In part, the deception gained credence in the international community because it fitted with the widespread view that the UN’s economic sanctions were wrong. That said, there was no major rise in child mortality in Iraq after 1990 and during the period of the sanctions. Conversely, there was no major improvement in child mortality after the downfall of Saddam Hussein. In this context, a rare instance in which the fact of the deception has been twigged appears in the Iraq Inquiry report published in 2016. With reference to Tony Blair’s statement about the level of child mortality prevailing before 2003, and its subsequent major decline, Sir John Chilcot and his colleagues clearly decided that the rates for before 2003, based on the ICMMS, were greatly inflated.33 34

In conclusion, the rigging of the 1999 Unicef survey was an especially masterful fraud. That it was a deception is beyond doubt, although it is still not generally known. However, when the UN realised its mistake it led to a sudden and large upward revision of its estimate of life expectation in Iraq during 2000–2005, from 57 to 70 years.23 24

This is laughable in context of your support that ALL sanctions are war crimes.

Even if taken at face value, and there's considerable reason to question the results coming out of these authoritarian, anti-media nations, that at best could be said that specific sanctions on specific countries should be stricken and are of questionable nature. That's a reasonable take, and you could argue that either way.

That's not the statement you are backing. There are over 450 sanctions in place by the UN, international associations such as the EU, and by individual countries at this time. Some of them are extremely specific and narrowly targeted, such as the Magnitsky Act.

Trading with authoritarian regime may or may not be the appropriate action, depending on the specific context. I'm old enough to remember the argument from Nixon that we should drop sanctions against the People's Republilc of China, that free trade with them would increase democracy and improve their human rights record.

How has that one worked out? Ask someone in Tibet, Hong Kong, or a Uighur. If you can find one.

What I posted was from 2014. If you'd rather, here's a BBC article from 2019:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-48119109

Oh, and take a look at the actual sanctions:
https://fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RS20871.pdf

One of the actions being taken is that Iranian assets are sold off and used to compensate "U.S. victims of Iranian terrorism."

$50 BILLION in assets.

I wonder when the United States will do the same for all of the countries it bombs? Do they not get compensated for our terrorism?

"This is laughable." I'm not laughing. This isn't a game to me, it's not a theory exercise. I work with and talk to people directly affected by many of these sanctions.

If you believe purposely starving people to punish a government is justifiable, then say so. You don't have to be coy about it, there are people here who will agree with you. I'm not one of them, but I'm sure there are people who would say "yeah, in some cases it's okay." You can be honest.

I'm always honest, but sometimes that means nuance, and you reject that categorically. See: this thread.

I blame most of the food insecurity problems on the authoritarian governments. Most of them can feed their people, even in the middle of sanctions.

They just make other choices, don't they?

The fact that you refuse to address that when it's obvious, putting all the moral culpability on the EU, UN and the US, speaks volumes.

I don't pretend the United States doesn't bully other nations for their resources, or that it doesn't advance an imperialist colonizer mentality onto other nations that do not have the resources by which to fight back. That includes the global south. Do you consider the United States government an authoritarian government that can feed its people but doesn't? That can provide healthcare to its people and doesn't? That can stop militarizing its police force, especially against black people, and doesn't? That has the largest incarcerated population in the world and yet calls itself free? What is the US government to you? What justifies their authoritarianism, in your opinion?

In some ways the USA is a third world country in a first world country veneer...

It is. As it was said by Jasmine Tyon (just a regular Twitter user as far as I'm aware), America is a third world country in a Gucci belt. This talk about nuance isn't actually about nuance. There are things you can be nuanced about, but when it comes to economic sanctions against already poor countries, it's not really about nuance, but about apologia. It's about finding reasons why the bad things being done to others are okay, actually.

Did you know the US Supreme Court just recently struck down an attempt to sue Nestle and Cargill Foods over child slavery? The reason given was because the child slavery occurred outside the United States, and thus those companies could not be held accountable for it. The people who sued those companies, former child slaves, were essentially told that what happens outside the US, even if the company involved operates inside the US, stays outside the US.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57522186

The US engages in imperial apologia every day, all of the time, in our news, in our policies, it's something we do because if we actually stopped and asked ourselves "are we the baddies?" and really reflected on the question, we might not like the answer.

I heard about the child slavery case...
There will be other companies trying to use that as a defence...
Not just child labour but also sketchy deals with companies in other sketchy countries...

Try "now, and consistently over the course of several decades."

https://explorer.usaid.gov/