Hypocritical NCC Director Rage-Quits
Joe Kent resigned his post atop the National Counterterrorism Center in protest of President Trump’s war with Iran and the Israel lobby.
“We should not sit and wait for the next attack, wipe Iran’s ballistic capability out,” warned Joe Kent in January 2020. In another X post the next day, he added, “I personally think we should have crushed their ballistic & nuke capes, but [President Donald] Trump has a plan, he has definitely earned the confidence of any clear eyed observer.”
Evidently, Kent has changed his mind because he suddenly and very publicly resigned from his post as director of the National Counterterrorism Center yesterday. The Green Beret veteran is the highest-ranking Trump administration official to do so this term.
“I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran,” Kent posted on X. “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”
Ah, there it is — the Jews.
Don’t get me wrong; disagreeing with the government of Israel isn’t necessarily antisemitic, but it sure seems like it’s a pretty short walk from opposing Israeli policy to blaming the Jews for the world’s problems. Given Kent’s friendship with Tucker Carlson, I wonder how far down that road he’s gone.
Carlson called Kent “the bravest man I know” and warned that “the neocons will now try to destroy him.”
In Kent’s resignation letter, he condemned the lies about Iran that he called “the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war.” Actually, Israel warned the U.S. against invading Iraq. He claimed that “high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media deployed a misinformation campaign” to provoke the attack on Iran. Kent also noted that this is personal — he’s “a veteran who deployed to combat 11 times” and “a Gold Star husband who lost my beloved wife Shannon in a war manufactured by Israel.”
She was killed by an Islamofascist ISIS suicide bomber in Syria in 2019, leaving him to raise their two boys.
Israel has every right to try to eliminate an existential threat and to solicit the help of a key ally in doing so. That isn’t a sinister plot; it’s a natural human right. You can oppose the particulars of that defense, but you can’t deny the right simply because it’s Israel.
As for the “imminent threat” canard, our Mark Alexander says, “Waiting on a fascist Islamic regime that is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism to become an ‘imminent threat’ as it develops nuclear weapons is reckless national security idiocy.”
“Death to America” Iran has been at war with the U.S. for 47 years, killing hundreds of Americans all over the world and posing a threat to our national security. Iran is the leading state sponsor of terrorism, which I would think ought to concern the director of the National Counterterrorism Center — the president’s principal counterterrorism adviser. And what about Iranian sleeper cells and a spate of recent terror attacks here in the States?
Seems pretty “imminent” to me.
President Trump sees things similarly. “When I read his statement, I realized that it’s a good thing that he’s out because he said Iran was not a threat,” he said. “Iran was a threat — every country realized what a threat Iran was.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt added:
As President Trump has clearly and explicitly stated, he had strong and compelling evidence that Iran was going to attack the United States first. This evidence was compiled from many sources and factors. President Trump would never make the decision to deploy military assets against a foreign adversary in a vacuum. Iran is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. The Iranian regime is evil. It proudly killed Americans, waged war against our country, and openly threatened us all the way up to the launch of Operation Epic Fury.
More than once during Trump’s first term, a member of his administration would make a big show of shivving Trump on the way out the door. Kent is simply the latest in this tradition. At the very least, his departure seems like an opportunity for an upgrade at the National Counterterrorism Center.
