Mossad had established that some of the techniques used at the secret interrogation centers were based on the notorious MK-ULTRA brainwashing program run by the CIA at the height of the Cold War. The MI6 officer who had witnessed the shackled prisoners on their way to Uzbekistan claimed (to the author) that upon arrival they were subjected to “sensory deprivation for lengthy periods, mock executions, starvation, sexual violence, rape, immersion in water to the point of drowning, beatings, exposure to intense heat or cold, clamping off blood circulation by wire restraints, near strangulation, flesh burning with cigarettes, and the use of a variety of drugs to weaken a prisoner’s resistance.”
Meantime Mossad continued to identify names in Arabic newspapers of terrorists who had been sent to the torture chambers. The daily trawl also gathered up the latest pamphlets extolling as “heroes” the bombers of 9/11 and issued updated lists of addresses for Britain’s synagogues and the homes of their rabbis. “They should be reminded of the crimes Jews had committed against Muslims,” urged the London-based radical group, Al-Muhajiroun. The same kind of reminder was spelled out by another group, Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades. It told its growing number of supporters in Britain it had “declared a bloody war against our non-Muslim neighbors. We will rase the cities of Europe to the ground. We will turn them into cities drenched with blood until its leaders withdraw their troops from Iraq.”
Muslim clerics were regularly invited on to the BBC to justify the “martyrdom” of suicide bombers because, as Dr. Yusuf al-Qardawi told the corporation’s current affairs flagship program,
With the help of its sayanim network of Jewish volunteers throughout Britain, Mossad’s London Station gathered mounting evidence on the extent of the threat Muslim extremism posed to the United Kingdom. There were now close to five thousand sayanim in Britain in 2005, who acted as “the eyes and ears” Meir Amit had envisaged when he created the network. They were no longer made up of relatives of European Jews who had arrived in the country in the 1930s, refugees from nazism. Now they included Jews from Lebanon, Syria, and, more recently, Iraq and Iran: shopkeepers, landlords, and café owners in Asian communities who provided a steady stream of information.
An Iraqi bookseller in the north London suburb of Wembley had provided proof that Islamic extremists had reached the heart of the Blair government. Ahmad Thomson, a Muslim barrister and a senior member of the Association of Muslim Lawyers, had been appointed to advise the prime minister on how to deal with the matter. Thomson was also the author of a fast-selling book in the Muslim community. Titled
Though the Blair government had finally promised that extremist preachers and scholars who promoted terrorism would be deported, those radical imams and teachers continued throughout the summer of 2005 to deliver their diatribes about holy war in their mosques and post inflammatory articles on their Web sites.
