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Experts say the undergarment bomb probably would have shown up on the new generation of whole-body imaging scanners that are chiefly designed to detect explosives. These devices, using millimeter waves or X-rays, generate a picture so detailed that the officials reviewing them are located elsewhere for the sake of passenger modesty. But Amsterdam's Schiphol has only about 15 of these machines serving some 90 gates, and they are used on a voluntary basis only on short-haul flights within Europe. That's partly because the wave scanners are costly--they sell for $180,000--and partly because American airlines and the E.U. remain wary of devices that electronically undress passengers. The scanners are rare in the U.S.; in June, the House of Representatives voted in an amendment to a transportation bill to ban the use of scanners for routine screenings. "You don't need to look at my wife and 8-year-old daughter naked in order to secure that airplane," said Representative Jason Chaffetz, Republican from Utah, during the debate.
So five years after the bipartisan 9/11 commission recommended that Congress and the Transportation Security Agency "give priority attention" to screening passengers for explosives, the practice remains overwhelmingly the exception and not the rule. Only about 40 millimeter-wave devices are in use, at 19 U.S. airports. Standard magnetometers, which are used at the vast majority of the more than 2,000 checkpoint lanes nationwide, can detect metal in guns and knives but are worthless against explosives like PETN.
The U.S. has spent nearly $800 million trying to develop sniffers and scanners that could be more widely used--a whole-body imager, a bottled-liquid scanner, an automated explosive-detection system for carry-on baggage and another made especially for shoes, designed to work while they're still on your feet. But they have been slow to be deployed. Only one device, which sniffs the air for trace explosives, is in relatively widespread use, at just 36 airports--and it would not have detected Abdulmutallab's bomb.
Even the fanciest machines, however, won't make the system fail-safe. Security experts say the hunt for the perfect shield is misplaced: bullets always outrun armor, and the same is true of terrorists and scanners. Or as Winston Churchill warned of a different threat in a different war, "The bomber will always get through."
3 | Al-Qaeda is bigger than Osama bin Laden
As Obama sends 30,000 more troops to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a haven for terrorists, it is obvious that al-Qaeda has set up franchises to wage offensive war against the U.S. in places like Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Yemen, which has vast tracts of lawless countryside, has been harboring--and nurturing--terrorists for years. It is the site of the 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole that killed 17 U.S. sailors, as well as the stomping ground of Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical cleric and cyber--pen pal of Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood, Texas, shooter who killed 13 people in November. Abdulmutallab visited Yemen at least twice, most recently from August to December 2009, studying Arabic--and, apparently, bombmaking.