‘US literally waging war on free expression’: American commentator

The United States “literally is waging a war on free expression,” says an American writer and political commentator.

Stephen Lendman made the remarks in an interview with Press TV on Saturday after the US State Department called on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to block the accounts of Iranian government leaders. Brian Hook, the special US representative for Iran, called on the giant social media networks to suspend the accounts of Iranian leaders.

"One of the things that we are calling on are social media companies like Facebook and Instagram and Twitter to shut down the accounts of Supreme Leader (Ali) Khamenei, the Foreign Minister (Mohammad Javad) Zarif and President (Hassan) Rouhani until they restore the Internet to their own people," Hook said in an interview last week with Bloomberg posted on the official State Department Twitter account.

US urges social media to block accounts of top Iranian officials

The US has called on social media giants Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to suspend accounts linked to Iranian government leaders.

Lendman said, “The US literally is waging a war on free expression. It doesn’t matter that the US Constitution’s First Amendment guarantees it, but speech, press and academic freedoms in the US are being attacked and being threatened with ending because of the policies of the government.”

“It’s happening in the US, it’s happening abroad, it’s happening in the US policy toward Iran. The idea that the US wants Iranian domain names shut down or eliminated or wanting its officials having no free access to social media, this is the part of the US effort to control the message, wanting its own narrative alone to spread via the media, via public comment, by any spread of information and anything different, different narrative they want shut out,” he stated.   

“We see what’s been happening with Americans and with Julian Assange. Julian Assange is being detained in Britain for extradition to the US where he may never arrive because he has been so brutally treated – he may die in the interim before an extradition hearing is completed. But the idea behind that is to silence the message and the messenger. It’s to silence the free speech, silence the people what are spreading it. They want only the US message to be sent out for people to hear, not only in the US but in other countries around the world, everywhere,” he added.  

“The US media cooperates with the US agenda. They are not really the media, they are the propaganda organs, whether it’s New York Times, CNN, or CBS – all of them. They are propaganda organs,” the analyst noted.

Press TV’s website can also be accessed at the following alternate addresses:

www.presstv.co.uk