America’s home-grown terrorist threat

Americans worry about terrorism quite a bit. Ever since the attempted Christmas Day 2009 bombing over Detroit it takes even longer to get through the security check-points in a US airport.

But the obsession with looking for Arab Muslims who are planning to attack a plane may be blinding America to a different but very dangerous threat.

They seem to be wilfully ignoring the “threat within”. The growing numbers of American citizens who are ready and willing to attack the homeland from inside its borders.

They seem to be wilfully ignoring the “threat within”.

People who have American passports and can travel the country freely – people who can legally buy weapons to kill their fellow Americans. People who do not fit the stereotype of an Islamic terrorist.

Colleen LaRose, or Jihad Jane, doesn’t look like anyone’s idea of a warrior. Yet the blonde blue-eyed suburbanite from Philadelphia has been charged in connection with a plot to kill a Danish cartoonist.

David Headley is an American citizen from Chicago who has pleaded guilty to plotting terrorist attacks in Mumbai that killed 166 people.

When Nidal Hassan shot dead 13 soldiers at Fort Hood in Texas we soon learned he’d been inspired by contact with another American – Anwar Alawlaki. A man who is known as the Bin Laden of the internet.

He is originally from Washington DC and now in Yemen. He puts out propaganda videos in English deliberately to try and inspire a following inside America. Yet the Fort Hood attack is not considered to be terrorist attack.

Maybe it is simply too terrible to contemplate the idea that a jihadi attack was carried out inside a US military base. That would mark a significant failure in the war in terror – so it is considered an ordinary crime.

The same is true of what may have been the first attack inside America carried out by an American who was inspired by al-Qaida.

Last summer a young African American drove up to a US army recruiting centre in Little Rock Arkansas and shot the soldiers who were outside smoking cigarettes.

Twenty-three-year-old private William Long died at the scene – a new recruit who had never even seen active duty.

Another soldier was injured but survived. The shooter had been born Carlos Bledsoe, and was brought up a Baptist Christian in Memphis Tennessee. But by the time of the shooting he had converted to Islam and changed his name to Abdul Hakim Muhammad.

He has written to the judge in his case claiming to be a member of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula and claiming he carried out his “jihadi attack” in retribution for the killing of a Muslim by American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But he will appear in a county court not a federal one. Charged with simple murder not terrorist crimes. The prosecutor in Pulaski County, Arkansas, told me that the people who live there don’t care why someone is going around their streets shooting soldiers.

They just want the culprit punished. And the prosecution are confident Bledsoe will eventually face the death penalty by lethal injection.

The growing number of Americans like Bledsoe who have been arrested in connection with terrorist plots points to the fact that Islamic extremist groups are actively recruiting in the US, targeting Americans who can easily pass security checks and blend in effortlessly as potential warriors.

The father of Carlos Bledsoe, Melvin, thinks its threat that Americans urgently need to take more seriously – he warms that there are “bloodsuckers” and “evildoers” in America actively recruiting naive young Americans, like his son, and persuading them to kill.

He fears until people realise the extent of the threat it will happen again and again and again.