Tom Cotton and other Republican Congressmen are doing the right thing in awarding these two soldiers Purple Hearts. It's sad that this story received almost no airplay. Now Obama cannot say that their hasn't been a terrorist attack on US soil during his administration...not that he could truthfully say it before.
http://www.militarytimes.com/story/m...eart/25909841/
What I'm reading that wasn't brought to light earlier was the amount of scrutiny the FBI had the perpetator under before the incident.
http://www.investigativeproject.org/...st-abdulhakim#
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Things went from bad to worse when Muhammad traveled to Yemen in 2007 for the stated purpose of teaching English. Relatives tried to talk him out of it. But when that didn't work, they made him promise that he would avoid any involvement in radical activity. He agreed.
Bledsoe believes his son may have planned to do that, but had no idea that in going to Yemen he was being "set up" by jihadist recruiters (he calls them "hunters") intent on radicalizing him. The hunters confiscated the video camera his family gave him, and he kept losing his cell phone, Bledsoe said.
Details of his time in Yemen remain murky. He may have studied under a radical imam. In September 2008, Muhammad married one of his students in Aden. Two months later, he was arrested for overstaying his visa and carrying a fake Somali passport. Muhammad said he was carrying it because he planned to go to Somalia to fight a jihad against Jews and Americans.
Bledsoe told the Investigative Project on Terrorism that he only learned his son was in jail because his Yemeni wife searched frantically through his belongings where she found the Bledsoe family's telephone number in Memphis.
Over the next few months, Melvin Bledsoe embarked on an intensive lobbying campaign to win his son's release. An FBI agent from Nashville traveled to Yemen to interview his son in jail. Eventually, State Department officials persuaded Yemen's interior minister to free Abdulhakim Muhammad. In January 2009, he was released from jail and, against his wishes, deported from Yemen to the United States.
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As the young man's marriage crumbled, he was summoned to Nashville for a meeting with the same FBI agent who had interviewed him in Yemen. Melvin Bledsoe suspects the FBI wanted to "flip" his son and get him to work for the government monitoring militant groups in the Nashville area. The family, by contrast, wanted to distance him from these very groups and integrate him into the family business in Little Rock, hundreds of miles away.
Army Recruiters Shot In Arkansas To Receive Purple Heart
