Kent resigned

+ On Tuesday, Joe Kent resigned as Director of the National Counterterrorism Center in protest of Trump’s war on Iran. In his resignation letter, Kent wrote that Iran posed no threat to the US.

+ No one this high-ranking resigned from the Biden administration over abetting Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, which tells you a lot about the people who ran the Biden administration, most of whom should be hauled to The Hague. 

+ The question is, why didn’t Gabbard walk out with Joe Kent? What does she expect to get out of this in the end, except an NDA she’ll be forced (or paid) to sign prohibiting her from saying what she really thought of Trump…

+ Nothing much will surprise me about Tulsi Gabbard, but I’m still curious as to what Gabbard gets out of working in the Trump administration. They’ve basically kept her in a closet for months. She doesn’t travel. She doesn’t make press appearances. She won’t even go on the friendly confines of Fox, where every question is set up for her like an at-bat during a T-ball game. She’s been kept out of White House meetings on Iran, Israel and Venezuela. No one inside the Trump decision-making circle seems to value or care what she has to say. What’s in it for her?

+ John Simpson, longtime correspondent and presenter for the BBC: “Over the years, I’ve been in many towns and cities when they were being bombed — in a few cases (Baghdad, Belgrade, etc.) by my own country. No matter what the justification, most of the victims have been entirely innocent. I’ve come to loathe the very thought of aerial bombardment.”

+ Trump is sending 2,500 Marines to Karg Island in the Strait of Hormuz. Who knows why? After picking up his Nobel Peace prize, Trump’s nemesis and eternal obsession, Barack Obama, sent 30,000 troops to Afghanistan in 2011 to shore up the failing US war, only to see the war end up failing even worse than before.

+ Israel continues to hemorrhage support among Americans, across the political spectrum. A new NBC News poll found only 32 percent view Israel positively, down from 47 percent in 2023, while 39 percent see it negatively, up from 24 percent. The turn against Israel is occurring in parties and all ages, but most decisively among Democrats with positive views collapsing to 13 percent, and among young voters aged 18-34 at just 13 percent positive versus 63 percent negative. Sympathies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have also flipped, with 40 percent now siding more with Palestinians compared to 39 percent for Israelis, amid Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza.

+ The Democrats are a poll-fixated party on just about every issue, except Israel. 

+ Ben Ehrenreich: “As a feature writer with more than twenty years of experience in the industry, I don’t think of magazines as A-tier or B-tier or whatever. I just think about whether they shilled for genocide.”

+ In the last 20 years, beef production has caused four times as much deforestation as the cultivation of any other food source.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/03/20/roaming-charges-trumps-little-excursion-hits-the-straits/