"I had met people like Padilla as a cub reporter for Chicago’s City News Bureau, hanging around police stations, watching gang members being locked up. None of them resembled Enrico Fermi or Edward Teller.... when I was living in Hyde Park/University of Chicago area, I became acquainted with someone who worked at the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists magazine. I met Leo Szilard and Hans Bethe and from what I could learn about Padilla, there didn’t seem to be all that much commonality of interests and intellectual capacity.... Had they found such a serious terrorist’s threat, just in time to save thousands of Americans from annihilation? Or had they just grabbed the closest low hanging fruit that had already dropped to the ground and called it a dirty bomber?"
Links:
[1] http://www.firedoglake.com/2007/05/16/seeing-jose-padilla-for-the-first-time/#more-9049