It is not jumping to a conclusion to speculate that the US is preparing to move against Press TV, as it has against RT, the Russian sponsored news outlet. RT has been required to register in the US as a foreign agent, which is extremely unusual. As a so-called foreign agent, RT has lost many of its abilities to gather the news and present it to the public. The immediate concern for Marzieh Hashemi is the potential that she might be charged with being an agent of a foreign government. If tried and convicted under the oppressive 1917 Espionage Act and 1918 Sedition Act it could result in a lengthy prison sentence.
The 1917 Espionage Act and the 1918 Sedition Act are two archaic laws that have no place in a free country. The laws are zombies from World War One. They were resuscitated as part of the War on Terror by Bush and Obama, after nearly a century of being dormant.
Apparently, the US government is preparing to ask a grand jury to rule that Press TV is a propaganda outlet. It is not as if the US government does not have its own propaganda outlets. The half-dozen or so mainstream media outlets, such as ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, CNN, MSNBC, and the print media are owned by monopolies that are virtual US government media propaganda organs. The US media are little more than repeaters of the US government propaganda narratives.
The proof of how much the US mainstream media kowtows to the government is that they are not coming to the defense of Marzieh Hashemi and freedom of the press. There was a time when they would have. And where is the ACLU? While the US news media and civil rights organizations are quiet, the rest of the world is not. At a time when the online alternative media is also under attack, they are defending freedom of the press for the people.
Every day the US becomes more fascistic, and every day the Bill of Rights is being eroded. No longer can any US citizen feel safe in freely expressing their opinion verbally, in the media or in writing. The US government has been on a binge of abusing its power. Following 9/11 Bush rushed the Patriot Act through an eager Congress. Among other provisions, the Patriot Act authorizes indefinite detention, search and seizure, domestic spying and wiretapping without a warrant. When the act was due to expire in 2011, Obama extended it.
For a while after 9/11 the US mainstream media was outraged with the US government's illegal excesses. It was sensational news in 2013 when Edward Snowden disclosed the extremes to which the National Security Agency had gone in its illegal domestic spying.
The Patriot Act had given the government the proverbial inch and they had taken a mile, so to speak. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, alongside FBI Director Robert Mueller, was caught lying to Congress about US illegal spying. Unlike for most citizens if they are caught lying to Congress, Clapper was not prosecuted. Incredibly he even kept his government job and his security clearance.
In 2015 when the Patriot Act was about to expired, and after Edward Snowden had revealed the magnitude of illegal US spying, then the USA Freedom Act was passed, amending and extending the Patriot Act through 2019. The US government and the media pretended that the USA Freedom Act had resolved the conflict between government spying and the Constitutional protections of the Bill of Rights. It did not, but one would never know it from the exuberant mainstream media and the Democratic and Republican members of Congress.
Rand Paul was accused of "having blood on his hands" for trying to filibuster the USA Freedom Act. A laughing Mitch McConnell, who had helped cut off Paul's filibuster said, "I'm not concerned about my privacy, I'm concerned about my security."
Unbeknownst to most of the public, the US has been in a declared state of emergency since September 11, 2001. The state of emergency was declared by George W. Bush with Proclamation 7463, and it has been renewed annually by Bush, Obama and Trump. In addition, Bush secretly put into effect Continuity of Government (COG). In effect, the US is under martial law, has been since 9/11, and the US Constitution is in state of suspended animation.
The mainstream media has been mum. The public is now pacified. Many citizens even enthusiastically support their civil rights being taken from them, just as Mitch McConnell has.
After the attacks of 9/11, it became a cliche' for people to say about government surveillance, "if you haven't done anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about". Once the ridiculousness of that attitude became thoroughly mocked and a meme, then people stopped saying it, but they did not stop acting as if they did not believe it.
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