WikiLeaks: US Funded UK Effort to Blunt Muslim Extremists

LONDON -- The United States launched a secret campaign to deradicalize young British Muslims after receiving warnings that the U.K. was struggling to address the threat posed by homegrown extremists, according to a new series of diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks.

The program, which had a budget of at least $50,000, began in 2008 after repeated warnings that the U.K. was not doing enough to counter domestic extremism. In August 2006 -- just over a year after four British Muslims blew themselves up on the London transport system, killing 52 people -- the U.S. Embassy in the capital sent a dispatch to Washington noting that although the British government had "invested considerable time and resources in engaging the British Muslim community ... little progress has been made."

That point was hammered home in a 2007 report from the embassy, which highlighted the lack of support offered to moderate British Muslims trying to fight extremism in their own community.

The document detailed a visit by diplomatic staff to Finsbury Park Mosque in north London. Extremist Imam Abu Hamza al-Masri and a gang of Islamist thugs took over the holy house in the late 1990s. "Shoe bomber" Richard Reid and 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui were regular visitors to the mosque during the Abu Hamza years.

The radicals were finally booted out in 2003 following a commando-style police raid -- Abu Hamza was tossed in jail the following year -- and the visiting diplomats noted that the building was "apparently cleansed of its extremist past and working hard to counter radicalization within the community." But mosque leaders complained that Abu Hamza and his followers would never have been able to spread hatred if police had listened to them back in the late 1990s, when they first asked for help evicting the extremist imam.

Around the time this last report was sent back to Washington, the U.S. had started "seeding" counter-radicalization projects in countries where radical Islam was viewed as a growing danger. The U.K., home to 2.8 million Muslims, was apparently a significant cause for concern. Dell Dailey, the head of the State Department's counterterrorism office, offered the London embassy $50,000 to spend on anti-extremism schemes.

In spring 2008, the London embassy said it would welcome the funding and offered two proposals that could help prevent British Muslims from turning to Jihadism. The first involved paying an American academic $43,000 to study reformed British extremists who had "stepped back" from radical Islam. The interviews would serve as a "source of information on radicalization in the UK -- its causes and what they believe will work to deflate it," the document states. Lessons learned from this project could then potentially be applied "in the U.S. and elsewhere in Europe."

The second suggestion involved spending $39,000 to fly the American "Allah Made Me Funny" comedy troupe to the U.K. to take part in the Ramadan Festival U.K. "The message their performance would send -- of American Muslims, proud to be both 'American' and 'Muslim' -- is a powerful message that would open British Muslim eyes to American cultural and religious diversity," the document noted, "as well as encourage reflection on the part of British Muslim community in a positive, self-defining direction." The diplomat said that the troupe's "positive messages" would likely reach "thousand[s] of British Muslims, including the disproportionately high youth population."

However, other WikiLeaks releases suggest that such initiatives would prove woefully inadequate in countering the perceived Islamist threat. In 2008, a member of Britain's foreign intelligence agency, MI6, told a visiting congressional delegation that radicalism among young U.K. Muslims was a "generational" problem that wouldn't "go away anytime soon." He said that the threat posed by "internal" radicals was "growing more dangerous because some extremists are conducting non-lethal training without ever leaving the country."

The agent, whose name has been redacted from the embassy report, said that if these undercover extremists chose to become "suicide operatives [British] intelligence resources, eavesdropping and surveillance would be hard pressed to find them on any 'radar screen.' "

Another cable sent that same year suggests that counter-extremism efforts also need to be aimed at older British Muslims. According to a July 2008 dispatch cited by British daily The Telegraph, Laura Hickey -- the U.K. Foreign Office's team leader in Pakistan -- told American diplomats there was "a growing trend of U.K.-based parents who send their 'problem children' to madrassas in Kashmir, and these students are at high risk of radicalization."

Hickey said that because al-Qaida and other extremist groups are known to run training camps inside Pakistan-administered Kashmir, Britain was concerned "U.K. passport-holders will be recruited to commit terrorist operations in the U.K."