Full-Body Scanners: British Airports Now Using Them

Why did it take this latest incident, 8 years after 9-11, to employ them. Until recently airport security required us to take off our shoes. Obviously, the politicians are not stupid enough to require us to take off our underwear. I had been arguing for some time that the practice of removing shoes was a false sense of security. Now we have a new excuse that will not make us safer. We need a government that has an effective worldwide strategy for fighting terrorism. We need a new agency made up of skilled counter-terrorists. We need an agency that connects the dots. We obviously have a government that is clueless:

Prime Minister Gordon Brown says full-body scanners will be introduced in Britain's airports in the wake of the failed Christmas Day bombing attempt of a U.S. airliner.

Brown told the British Broadcasting Corp. on Sunday that all airport security would be increased in Britain, and all passengers even those only transiting through the country will have their hand luggage screened for traces of explosives.

The suspect in the failed Northwest Airlines bombing had changed planes in The Netherlands and gone through security but not through a full-body scanner.

Britain's main airport operator BAA says it has ordered full-body scanners and would introduce them as soon as possible. BAA operates Europe's busiest airport, Heathrow, as well as other British airports.

Heathrow and Manchester airports have had trials using the full-body scanners.

This individual should have been on the radar. It was laughable failure:

British intelligence officials knew that the Nigerian man suspected of trying to bomb a Detroit-bound airliner had ties to U.K. extremists did not consider him enough of a high risk to alert American authorities, a senior British official said Sunday.

Officials realized about a year after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab came to London to study in 2005 that he was in contact with Islamic extremists whose communications were being monitored, a senior government official told The Associated Press on Sunday.

But there were no signs that Abdulmutallab wanted to target the United States or was considering turning toward violence, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of his work.

"It was clear he was reaching out to radical extremists in the U.K. but there was nothing to indicate he was violent," the official said. "There is a very large number of people in the U.K. who express interest in radical extremism but never turn to violence. He only pinged up on our radar because of other people we were interested in."