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Full-Body Scanners Being Ordered For Airports, Says Gordon Brown
New full-body scanners are already being ordered by the British Airports Authority, the prime minister said this morning as he outlined a new regime of tightened airport security.
Speaking on BBC One's Andrew Marr programme, Gordon Brown pre-empted the findings of his own review by saying future passengers must expect to be scanned by the controversial scanners. The devices have received mixed appraisals on whether they are suitable to detect the new type of explosive that 23-year-old Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab is accused of using in an attempt to blow up a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day.
Since that attempted attack, an urgent review into airport security has begun. The transport secretary, Andrew Adonis, is expected to report its findings to parliament this week.
BAA, which operates six British airports, said today it would move quickly to install full-body scanners at London's Heathrow.
"Now that the government has given the go-ahead, we will introduce full-body scanners as soon as practical," a spokesman for BAA told Reuters. He said BAA was just looking at introducing the scanners at Heathrow – Europe's busiest airport by passenger numbers – at this stage.
A government source has told the Guardian that passenger profiling and the purchase of more scanners are highly likely to be among the review's recommendations and that the government will install the scanners "with or without" the international co-operation it had said it needed in the aftermath of the attempted terror attack.
The source pointed to the decision by Amsterdam's Schiphol airport to install the 17 scanners it first bought two years ago but was unable to activate after receiving EU advice that there were privacy and human rights implications. This dictat was used by the Department for Transport to explain why four of the UK's own scanners lay unused at Heathrow.
The prime minister's eagerness to show that his government is responding to the possibility of terrorists using different types of explosives came as he also had to admit Downing Street may have oversold his hand in moving to tackle the threat posed by Yemen, where the alleged bomber is thought to have been trained by an al-Qaida offshoot.
Brown announced on Friday that a conference already planned for 28 January to address Afghanistan will now also address what he believed to be the "failing state" of Yemen.
Over the weekend Downing Street went on to say that the prime minister and Obama had agreed in a personal telephone conversation that Britain and the US would jointly fund a counterterrorism police unit in Yemen. Yesterday afternoon the White House said it was a discussion held only at official level.
This morning Brown admitted there had been "no direct contact" between the two leaders on the issue and that the US and UK counterterrorism initiatives had been going on "for some time".
The prime minister's evident decision to support the installation of new £100,000 body scanners will be criticised since many industry insiders believe the machines are flawed.
Ben Wallace, a Tory MP who was involved in a British defence firm's project to test the scanner's effect before he entered parliament, told the Independent on Sunday that the kind of low-density materials used in Christmas Day's attempted attack would not have been detected. Instead the machines were best at detecting shrapnel, heavy wax and metal but not plastics, chemicals and liquids.
Wallace said: "Gordon Brown is grasping at headlines if he thinks buying a couple of scanners will make us safer. It is too little, too late." Instead, he said the time had come for the use of passenger profiling.
A government source has said profiling of passengers is now "in the mix" of the government's review.
Downing Street statement's includes other Brown ideas for clamping down on the threat from Yemen:
• Putting the threat from Yemen and Somalia on the agenda for the EU general affairs council in January.
• The financial action taskforce, an intergovernmental body set up to combat terrorist financing, should turn its attention to Yemen.
• Discuss the UK's reaction to the suspected bomb plot at a special meeting of the national security, international relations and development committee (NSID).
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Sources: Guardian.co.uk, Telegraph.co.uk, MSNBC, Google Maps
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