The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
The realization that human beings are always out there who are decidedly capable of the sheerest evil. And ignoring them, pretending that they don’t exist or are not planning anything “imminent” when it comes to using today’s weapons of mass destruction will never work.
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| American Thinker * |
"Kentucky Republican Congressman Thomas Massie has succinctly captured the problem.
"Over there at Fox News is this from Rep. Massie on the much-ballyhooed resignation of Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center: “Said Massie of the Kent resignation: ‘Another insider sees what we see: no imminent threat, just lobby pressure. This is why we need to defund and debate.’”
"No “imminent threat” from the Iranian war machine? Seriously?
"One wonders whether Massie has done any studying of history.
"Over there at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs is this from Center President Dr. Dan Diker and Tirza Shorr, a senior researcher and program coordinator at the Center. The title: “Understanding Iran’s Imminent Threat to America,” with the subtitle, “A 47-year record of attacks, nuclear brinkmanship, and explicit threats reveals why ‘imminence’ can no longer be measured by outdated standards.”
"In this very perceptive piece, Diker and Shorr say, among other things, this, with bold print for emphasis supplied:
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its global proxy network have killed more than 1,000 Americans since 1979. Iranian-backed forces conducted over 180 attacks on U.S. military bases in 2023–2024 alone. Iran’s stockpile of 440 kilograms of 60% highly enriched uranium reached a one-week breakout threshold for nuclear weapons before the June 2025 strikes. And just eleven days before Operation Epic Fury commenced, Iran’s Supreme Leader publicly threatened to send U.S. warships to the bottom of the sea. The question is not whether Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States. The question is why it took 47 years to respond to its longstanding threats.Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who headed the CIA in the 1990s, determined that the Iranian nuclear program has constituted an imminent threat: “If their policy is to go to the threshold but not assemble a nuclear weapon, how do you tell that they have not assembled? I don’t actually know how you would verify that.” By the time the United States knows with certainty that Iran has crossed the nuclear threshold, it may be too late to act. . . . More
. . . "Very quickly, though, we learned about the problems with Kent’s narrative and then with Kent himself.
First, there was a strong countervailing voice to Kent’s claim that Iran posed no threat to us. That voice, of course, was...Joe Kent:
. . . "With that information, Nathan Livingstone has put 2 plus 2 together and come up with a very interesting and believable 4. He contends that Kent was leaking to Candace Owens.
Yes, Candace, the woman who contends that the moon landing was fake, that Brigitte Macron is her own brother, that Israel assassinated Charlie Kirk, that Erika Kirk and Turning Point USA were happy to get rich off of Charlie’s death, that Israel and the Mossad control everything in the world Candace doesn’t like, that Jews aren’t really Jewish at all, that the Holocaust never happened, and on and on...that Candace: . . .Much more to this here...
