Fatigue

If one controller falls asleep at the proverbial wheel, then it makes sense to punish him; he is obviously doing something wrong.

If we find ourselves in the middle of a spate of these incidents, then it's time to reevaluate the management decisions that led to these events, not pull the typical government knee-jerk "let's fire everybody and then do the mandated minimum to make the media leave us alone" routine, which is where I see this going.

Also, you can bet that more than one tower manager is aware of these issues and has submitted recommendations - naturally ignored to lower costs - but the executives will act all indignant and fire all the low-level employees to give the appearance of doing *something* because who the heck cares about them?

Agreed. I highly doubt that controllers started to get fatigued just recently; this must have been an ongoing and neglected problem.