Ex-CIA official: 9/11 could not have been averted

By JERUSALEM POST STAFF
A former top CIA official said the intelligence agency had more than 100 Afghans acting as spies before the Sept. 11 terror attacks on the United States, but he told a magazine in a rare interview that nothing could have averted them. Cofer Black, former head of the CIA's counterterror center, said that looking back, he cannot think of anything "we could have done that would have changed anything." Black, a top executive with Blackwater Worldwide, the security firm, made the comment in an interview published in the November issue of Men's Journal. Black told the magazine that the Taliban was ousted in 10 weeks with just "300 Army special forces and 110 CIA officers," which ignores more than 1,000 U.S. soldiers and Marines and foreign troops that joined the battle in November 2001. He acknowledges that victory was temporary. "It was not as effectively followed up as we would have liked, as US military resources were redirected toward Iraq," he said.