At a Capitol Hill press conference on June 26th, Rep. Bob Filner (D-CA), chairman of the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, declared that the U.S. government, which has imposed stringent economic sanctions on Iran since the 1979 Islamic revolution and supported Iraq’s invasion of the country in the 1980s, had too often sought “to mollify or appease those in charge” of that country. Instead, Filner argued the U.S. should explicitly side with Iranian “resistance groups”, including the MEK, which he described as a “democratic, non-nuclear, secular group fighting for freedom for all the people in Iran.”