Following 9/11, the U.S. decided on two courses of action:
— It decided to go war by invading Afghanistan (which achieved “Major Non-NATO Ally Status” with Washington on Friday). Alas, 530 days later it fumbled that effort by invading Iraq.
— It decided to turn the nation into Fortress America.
That second decision led to the BioWatch program, a sophisticated system of electronic sniffers deployed around the country designed to alert authorities to a biological-weapons attack as it unfolds. We’ve invested — a perverse use of the word, to be sure — $1 billion on BioWatch to date, with $3 billion more to be spent. David Willman takes a disturbing look into the program in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times.