For a lot of these cases, I suspect the politicians just get rolled by a series of Very Serious People who spend all their time working on briefings which justi

For a lot of these cases, I suspect the politicians just get rolled by a series of Very Serious People who spend all their time working on briefings which justify their jobs and the attendant concentrations of power. "If not for this program, we would have had [large number] of 9/11s!"