A senior US counterterrorism official resigned on Tuesday in protest of the US-Israeli war against Iran, asserting that the Islamic Republic poses no imminent threat to the United States.
“I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran,” Joseph Kent, director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), said in his resignation letter to President Donald Trump.
Kent, a former Green Beret who served multiple combat tours, added: “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.”
At 45, Kent, who was appointed to head the NCTC by Trump, is the first senior US official to resign from the administration in protest of the conflict with Iran.
Kent’s wife, Shannon, who also served in the US military, was killed in a suicide bombing in Syria in 2019. In his letter, Kent wrote: “As a veteran who deployed 11 times and as a Gold Star husband who lost my beloved wife Shannon in a war manufactured by Israel, I cannot support sending the next generation off to fight and die in a war that serves no benefit to the American people nor justifies the cost of American lives.”
As head of the Virginia-based NCTC, Kent worked under Tulsi Gabbard, director of national intelligence, analyzing and coordinating the US response to terrorist threats and serving as the principal counterterrorism adviser to the president.
In his letter, Kent criticized what he described as a campaign of misinformation used to justify the war: “Early in this administration, high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran. This echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States and that a strike would lead to swift victory. This was a lie, the same tactic Israel used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war that cost the lives of thousands of our best men and women.”
Kent, a former CIA paramilitary officer, emphasized that he could not support sending Americans into a conflict with no clear benefit to the country.
After leaving the US Army, he twice ran unsuccessfully, in 2022 and 2024, as a Trump-endorsed Republican candidate for a US House seat from Washington State.
