United States Seizes Iranian News Channel's Websites

The Hyat Report

As I was scrolling through my twitter feed this morning, I came across tweets claiming that Press TV’s websites, which is an Iranian news channel, were seized by the United States. I am someone who do not usually just believe everything I read on social media, so I decided to do some research. Obviously, I first went to PressTV.Com and there indeed I found a message that read “The domain presstv.com has been seized by the United States Government in accordance with a seizure warrant issued…….by the Bureau of Industry and Security, Office of Export Enforcement and Federal Bureau of Investigation”, again I thought this could just be some hackers trying to provoke two countries who have been at odds for decades.

So, the next thing I did was, I went to the U.S Department of Justice’ website, which is also called DOJ in short, and there I found a statement that was dated Tuesday, the 22 June 2021 and in that statement, DOJ, indeed announced seizing 33 websites “used by the Iranian Islamic Radio and Television Union (IRTVU)”. For the context, In October 2020, Office of Foreign Assets Control of the US Department of Treasury, in short OFAC, that administers and enforces economic and trade sanctions based on U.S foreign policy and national security goals designated IRTVU as a “Specially Designated National (SDN)” for “attempting to influence elections in the United States”.

Now, you may ask what is an SDN, so, according to U.S Department of the Treasury, SDNs are “individuals and companies owned or controlled by, or acting for or on behalf of, targeted countries” and of course in this case the targeted country is Iran, because Iran has been under U.S sanctions for decades and the SDN is IRTVU for allegedly acting on behalf of Iran to “subvert U.S democratic processes” and under the U.S law, SDNs are prohibited from obtaining services, including website and domain services, in the United States without an OFAC licence. Against this backdrop the U.S Justice Department announced seizing these 33 websites. The U.S DOJ also seized three additional websites which were allegedly operated by “Kata’ib Hizballah”, which is a designated Foreign Terrorist Organisation by U.S State Department and an SDN by OFAC since July 2009.

However, Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson refuting American claims said that this act of website seizure by the United States was a systematic effort to disrupt freedom of expression and make silent the independent voices in media spaces and commenting further stated that Iran would follow up the case via legal channels.

In my honest opinion, the timing of this seizure of websites by the United States seems a little more than just enforcing sanctions, it appears to me that this a pressure tactic by the U.S on Iran, because Iran just had its presidential elections and elected a “hardliner”, Ebrahim Raisi, who has been quoted as saying that unlike Hassan Rouhani he won’t put all his eggs in one basket, by that he meant he won’t just rely on JCPOA for economic recovery and instead he would form alliances with countries in the region and elsewhere and potentially develop domestic economy. Also, if America’s goal was to only enforce sanctions, it could have done that last year soon after designating IRTVU as an SDN. To me personally, it appears that Biden administration is sending a message to Iran’s government and wants to demonstrate that the U.S is still in charge.