Joe Kent, former director of the US National Counterterrorism Center, has said that the joint US-Israeli decision to kill Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was “wrong” because Khamenei was preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons.
Joe Kent resigned two days ago in protest against the Iran war, saying he could not “go against his conscience” to support the war.
In an interview with Tucker Carlson, he said that Khamenei was keeping Iran’s nuclear program at a moderate level and that his assassination has “united the Iranian people and government in resistance.”
Kent claimed that the decision to attack Iran was primarily Israel’s, not the US’s.
According to him, Iran was not close to building a nuclear bomb and a 2004 fatwa still prohibits nuclear weapons.
According to US media, the FBI has launched an investigation into Joe Kent for leaking classified information.
President Trump responded to his resignation by saying that Kent was “weak on security” and that Iran was a “real threat”.
The White House also called Kent’s allegations “insulting” and said that the president had “credible evidence” of a possible Iranian attack.
In his resignation, Kent wrote that Iran had posed no immediate threat to the United States and that the war was launched under “Israeli pressure”.
He said that he could not support a conflict that “costs American lives and benefits the public.”
Kent is a former military and CIA officer, while his wife was killed in an attack in Syria in 2019.
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