Will body scanners at UK airports stop suicide bombers?

| 02-01-2010 | UK Politics | Written by Matthew Bennett

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Several Spanish newspapers ran stories yesterday about Gordon Brown ordering a review of airport security and announcing a special Yemen Terrorism Day alongside the What To Do With Afghanistan Day on January 28.

Gordo needs to look strong in 2010 with the general election only 5-months away so a double-whammy Afghan-Yemen terrorism summit is a good way to start, especially when a large part of the attention will be on the invasiveness of the airport body scanners which now appear to be all but inevitable.

But the new body scanners won’t really stop determined terrorists, will they? Spanish TV news ran the story last night and ended by saying that the new scanners were great but that they weren’t very good when it came to detecting liquids in bags under people’s clothes. I’m no expert but a quick google for ‘liquid explosives‘ turns up a quarter of a million results.

If the Small Wars Journal is right and Al-Qaeda is learning how to get around a Western socio-cultural terrorist blind spot based on social class (the Washington Post reckons it was an Afghan Army officer, not your average illiterate Afghan soldier, who blew himself up in the CIA gym at FOB Chapman), body-scanner misery for millions of innocent travellers won’t stop the bombers with explosives in their underpants.

The Spectator’s Coffee House blog points out an interesting comment from a pilot:

Even pilots’ toothpaste was examined; one pilot commented: “If I want to kill everyone (on board) I don’t faff around with plastic explosives, I point the nose at the ground”.

They suggest the politically delicate idea of profiling as a better way of trying to identify would-be terrorists, given that: “the overwhelming majority of global terrorism is committed by radical Muslims.“

Airline chiefs think body scanners are a bad idea too, as they’re not practical given the current state of the technology, according to the Guardian:

airline industry chiefs warned it would be impossible to screen all travellers with a new generation of body scanners the government now wants introduced at airports.

So it’s impossible to screen everyone who gets on an aircraft. It’s also impossible to read someone’s mind: if a suicide bomber is willing to play life’s ultimate joker card and doesn’t want to hang around life any longer, there’s precious little we can do to stop him until it’s too late.

Which is why I suspect Coffee House thinks profiling is a better idea – at least it’s an attempt to try and second-guess the intent of air-travellers.

Until someone comes up with a giant air-security mash-up between Facebook and Salesforce, the speed of distrust will slow us all down considerably.

The suicide terrorists will still find a way through sooner or later as different countries take different amounts of time to introduce different security measures with differing degrees of success.

I remember travelling from Alicante to Paris a month after the March 11 train bombings in Madrid in 2004: security at Alicante airport consisted of a couple of fat security guards smoking cigarettes and twiddling with their batons.

At Charles de Gualle in Paris, the French Army had all but taken over the airport, had taped off all of the cunning hidey-holes where a clever terrorist might hide a bomb and were blasting an ominous message over the tannoy system: “If you are leaving ze bags wizout attention, we will ‘ave to be blowing zem up.“