The arrest this week of two rural California men, after one acknowledged he attended an Al Qaeda camp in Pakistan to "learn to kill Americans," has revived questions about the hidden presence of potential terrorists on the home front.

To some experts, the arrests in what appears to be a widening investigation in Lodi are a sign that some homeland-security procedures are working as hoped. To others, the news suggests that Al Qaeda still has a dangerous and unknown reach into cities and towns across the US.

For now, Lodi, a farm town outside Sacramento with a longstanding Muslim community, has become a locus of concern. But beyond the ongoing investigation here in California, the case renews a broader question of how far Al Qaeda's US reach extends.

"This shows that Al Qaeda is still communicating with, recruiting, training, and sending people ... to carry out major operations worldwide, as they have steadily since 9/11," says Brian Jenkins, a terrorism expert at RAND Corp. in Santa Monica, Calif. At the same time, he says, the arrests also highlight the unprecedented coordination of intelligence services around the world to foil possible attacks.

Terror-related arrests have occurred this month in other parts of the country as well. In Florida and New York, two US citizens - Tarik Shah and Rafiq Abdus Sabir - were arrested in an FBI sting, accused of conspiring to provide material support to a terrorist organization. And in Falls Church, Va., Maher Amin Jaradat was arrested for fraudulently procuring US citizenship, with federal agents alleging he failed to disclose ties to militant groups.

In Lodi, the FBI arrested two US citizens, Hamid Hayat and his father, Umer, on charges of lying to federal agents about involvement and financing of a terror camp in Pakistan.

The men were not charged with planning specific attacks. But investigators anticipate that the ongoing probe may result in new insights about terror operations inside and outside the US.

The investigation in Lodi expanded late Wednesday to include three other local Muslims - including two imams - detained for alleged immigration violations. Investigators are trying to determine whether the arrests are evidence of a network of Al Qaeda supporters in the agricultural area.

Hamid Hayat first came to the attention of the FBI on May 29. Authorities discovered that his name was on the US government's "no fly" list while he was en route from South Korea to San Francisco. Such lists, used by the Department of Homeland Security, include names of suspected terrorists culled from confiscated computers in terrorist raids world wide.

Such procedures have been widely criticized for obstructing the movement of people with Arabic and Arabic-sounding surnames. Although the guilt or innocence of the men remains unproved, the arrests can be viewed as a "triumph, [given] all the criticism the DHS has taken over its no-fly lists," says Matthew Lippman, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Illinois. "We have not actually seen such an effectively documented case of domestic investigative effectiveness to this point."

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