WASHINGTON — Abdulhakim Muhammad was born Carlos Bledsoe, played high school football and attended business school in college. He mowed his grandmother’s lawn. He also converted to Islam at a Memphis mosque, studied in Yemen, and while there fell in with a group of fundamentalist extremists.
By the time he returned to the United States, federal law enforcement officials say, he had been dangerously radicalized as a domestic terrorist. When he allegedly opened fire with an SKS automatic rifle on a Little Rock, Ark., Army recruiting station, he became part of a rising trend — one of 50 Americans arrested on terrorism charges in the past two years.
From May 2009 to last November, authorities broke up 22 homegrown terror plots, compared with 21 during the previous eight years.
The House Homeland Security Committee opens hearings today into the terrorist threat in the United States. In the weeks ahead, the panel will hold sessions on the domestic radicalization of American Muslims.
Most of the suspects are being recruited in this country by foreign organizations through the Internet, community activities or, in some instances, local mosques.
For al-Qaeda, tapping into a new generation of potential terrorists already in the U.S. is easier and cheaper than finding ways to get attackers into the country, though the result has not approached anything close to the death toll of Sept. 11, 2001.
“The threat is real, the threat is different, and the threat is constant,” Attorney General Eric Holder said recently.
The committee chairman, Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., has rebuffed claims from religious and civil-rights groups that the hearings will unfairly target Muslim-Americans.
