Re: At the risk of souunding like a nut...
How many people would actually need to be involved? Maybe "they" didn't exactly know what was going down, they knew something was brewing and "they" let it slip between the cracks to create a scenario that would allow the MIC to expand into civilian life, not the Soviets were no longer bringing home so much Pork.
We *are* talking about the kind of people who thinks torture is OK "for the greater good" after all. Do people like that really have limits or boundaries they will not cross - or is it all a matter of personal risk versus reward?
Like, when we had that Anthrax scare conveniently right in the middle of building a case for Iraq War II, with all those WMD's everywhere (Saddam had Antrax - we know, because we sold it to the bastard).
So, *All* the conspiracy needed is for someone to just draw down on inter-agency-cooperation - one of the plots, of which there must be 10's of "brewing" any day of the week, could then "mature" and the cry for protection would spring the Pork from Public Coffers. It's not like anyone *planned* or *arranged* to have 4000+ people murdered, it just happened that way - the terrorists got, perhaps, a break and they got really lucky with it!
Fraud and Incompetence can appear very similar when seen from a distance.
PS:
Back 'ere we have the Danish Tax Office handing out tax refunds to fraudsters for at least 600 million EUR with no verification of the claims at all - which is not strange given that 5(!) the staff has to handle 2-300 claims each per week!
Is this a happy co-in-cidink - or - has some higher up's, who knows the business internals deliberately set up a structure that will enable fraud and planning for retirement in sunnier circumstances? *Control Frauds" are common enough in private business and guvmint want public service to be more "business-like". Which it certainly *is*, now.