Halliburton's Missing Radioactive Cylinder Found

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Halliburton's Missing Radioactive Cylinder Found

Posted by timothy on Tuesday October 9, 2012 @01:42AM from the in-the-junk-drawer-after-all dept.

First time accepted submitter Tator Tot writes "A small radioactive cylinder that went missing from a Halliburton Co. truck last month was found on a Texas road late Thursday, the company said, ending a weeks-long hunt that involved local, state and federal authorities."

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You know, I'll forgive them for this mistake by crazyjj · 2012-10-09 01:42 · Score: 4, Insightful

What I won't forgive them for is a $2 trillion+ war and tens of thousands of lives lost, all fought so they could get a juicy $7 billion no-bid contract (and about $40 billion in subsequent no-bid logistics contracts through their subsidiary KBR) from their former CEO, who had managed to sleaze his way into the vice-presidency.
I just wish that losing a little radioactive cylinder were the worst thing they had ever done.

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1. Re:You know, I'll forgive them for this mistake by Jeremiah+Cornelius · 2012-10-09 01:47 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  Maybe they can embed this cylinder in the hole in Dick Cheney's carapace, where he used to have a heart.
  
  --
  "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
  Never been known to fail..."
2. Re:You know, I'll forgive them for this mistake by Hatta · 2012-10-09 01:49 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  What I won't forgive them for is a $2 trillion+ war and tens of thousands of lives lost
  Not tens, hundreds. Dick Cheney is responsible for the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives.
  
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3. Re:You know, I'll forgive them for this mistake by O('_')O_Bush · 2012-10-09 02:01 · Score: 2
  
  You have that a bit sideways. Cheney was a warhawk and big elephant politician that later became the CEO of Halliburton, and later still became VP. It is misleading to leave out the other bit.
  
  There might have been some dirty dealings with Halliburton, but the Iraq War was far from a corporate conspiracy.
  
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4. Re:You know, I'll forgive them for this mistake by slackware+3.6 · 2012-10-09 02:05 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Did they find those WMD's yet?
5. Re:You know, I'll forgive them for this mistake by uradu · 2012-10-09 02:13 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  Umm, where do you think it came from--surely not the back of a truck?! That's the power cell for his animatronics!
6. Re:You know, I'll forgive them for this mistake by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · 2012-10-09 02:13 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  Mr. Cheney's fuel cask is rated for 1 decade of operation under normal circumstances, and does not require replacement at the present time.
  Please consult an executive maintenance technician at your nearest undisclosed location for further information regarding cask replacement schedules, procedures, and disposal regulations.
7. Re:You know, I'll forgive them for this mistake by Gizzmonic · 2012-10-09 02:17 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  THIS IS WHAT NEOCONS ACTUALLY BELIEVE.
  Yes, the US had to attack Iraq because a neutered dictator who couldn't even fly over his own country without getting blown out of the sky was an imminent threat to the most powerful nation in history. It was a matter of national security, dammit!
  Certainly not a wasteful imperialistic adventure that bankrupted the country, killed hundreds of thousands of innocents and left us in worse standing than ever in the Middle East.
  
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  (-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
8. Re:You know, I'll forgive them for this mistake by Hatta · 2012-10-09 02:20 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Somebody needed to provide those services
  No, nobody needed to provide those services. We had no need to invade iraq, and without Dick Cheney's advocacy we would not have. No war, no need for services.
  As for who's fault it is we went to war in Iraq? I'd lay that blame squarely at the feet of Sadam Husein. For years he thumbed his nose at the UN
  For years and years, yes. So where was the imminent threat? There was none, there was only an imminent opportunity for Cheney's cronies to make money.
  If we had not invaded Iraq, Saddam Hussein would still be in power, still thumbing his nose, but doing nothing to actually harm Americans. Instead, we have 2 trillion dollars to pay off (more than 9/11 cost our economy), 4800 dead Americans (more than died in 9/11), and hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis. Dick Cheney is a war criminal.
  
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9. Re:You know, I'll forgive them for this mistake by X0563511 · 2012-10-09 02:21 · Score: 2
  
  There might have been some dirty dealings with Halliburton, but the Iraq War was far from a corporate conspiracy.
  ... after all, it's not a conspiracy if it's done out in the open.
  
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10. Re:You know, I'll forgive them for this mistake by jd2112 · 2012-10-09 02:26 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  Did they find those WMD's yet?
  Yes, but they could never make the place where they filed down "Made in USA" look inconspicuous.
  
  --
  Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
11. Re:You know, I'll forgive them for this mistake by dkleinsc · 2012-10-09 02:42 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Dick Cheney is a war criminal.
  Also, we don't need to factor in the war crime of aggression. The case that he's a war criminal is very easy to make:
  1. Waterboarding was defined as a crime against humanity by the Allied tribunal in 1945.
  2. Ordering a war crime is a war crime.
  3. Dick Cheney announced on national television that he led a committee that ordered waterboarding.
  Defending Dick Cheney is the moral equivalent of defending Slobodan Milosevic.
  
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12. Re:You know, I'll forgive them for this mistake by M.+Baranczak · 2012-10-09 02:47 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  They were also involved in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. If we find out that Halliburton is responsible for the eruption of Eyjafjallajokull, for the Smolensk plane crash and for cancelling Farscape, it wouldn't surprise me in the least.
13. Re:You know, I'll forgive them for this mistake by Petron · 2012-10-09 03:06 · Score: 2
  
  For years and years, yes. So where was the imminent threat? There was none, there was only an imminent opportunity for Cheney's cronies to make money.
  If we had not invaded Iraq, Saddam Hussein would still be in power, still thumbing his nose, but doing nothing to actually harm Americans. Instead, we have 2 trillion dollars to pay off (more than 9/11 cost our economy), 4800 dead Americans (more than died in 9/11), and hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis. Dick Cheney is a war criminal.
  Keep in mind the top 3 intel agencies in the world all said he had WMDs and was ready to use them. Ends up he was wrong. The US Intel agencies started to share info better to detect errors like this. The Intel agent from British Intelligence committed suicide over the debacle. Unsure what the Russian Intel agency did to change.
  Now I saw a story (years ago), that theorized that Saddam faked the intel himself. He was worried about Iran taking advantage of his limited military (due to UN policies) and was bluffing on having WMD's to keep Iran from invading. This is why he didn't want to cooperate with UN inspection teams, wanting them to wait before inspections... not because he had WMD's, but he could keep his bluff.
  Also as for hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis... Saddam killed a million+ before we got involved. How many more would he kill if we didn't take him out?
  
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14. Re:You know, I'll forgive them for this mistake by tnk1 · 2012-10-09 03:09 · Score: 2
  
  Precisely, why was a war needed to boost the stock of oil companies? I've never understood why people think that other than "well the Middle East has oil, and we like oil, so we automatically must fight all wars over oil."
  The last thing an oil company wants is for you to start a war where the oil is. They have better ways of getting it. If they wanted Iraqi oil, all they needed to do was push for sanctions to be lifted and Saddam would have been pleased to sell them as much as they wanted.
  As for the WMDs, Iraq did have them at one point and Saddam did his best to make everyone believe he had them, until he realized that it was a really bad idea.
  The real reason the neocons wanted Saddam gone was that the no fly zone was expensive, and getting nowhere other than propping up a Kurdish state that Turkey wasn't all that happy about to begin with. Further, countries like France were trying to remove sanctions. We fought the Second Gulf War because we didn't finish the First Gulf War. It was certainly our prerogative to either topple Saddam, or occupy Iraq, or alternately, sign a peace treaty with him and leave him to his own devices. Instead, we did this half-assed thing where we constantly flew air missions violating Iraq's sovereignty for a mission we had no expectation of ever ending at that level of engagement. In short, we were heading towards either giving up, fighting a war, or dealing with an expensive, low intensity air conflict for decades. The WMD situation was important only because it made the choice of completely disengaging or maintaining the existing mission a much less palatable one. It meant that the US did not feel that it could leave Saddam in place when it came time to get out.
15. Re:You know, I'll forgive them for this mistake by shugah · 2012-10-09 03:14 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  WMDs - let's set the record straight on intelligence.
  
  For months preceding the war, there was real intelligence from real human assets on the ground; UNMOVIC and IAEA agents who repeatedly visited every suspected site and at the US behest and based on US intelligence visited countless other sites and revisited previous sites and found NO EVIDENCE of current, active WMD programs or materials. But this "boots on the ground" evidence was dismissed and ignored because it came from European "Surrender Monkeys" and UN/NGO bureaucrats. The only evidence of WMD programs came from Dick Cheney's special intel unit that didn't have ANY new data. All they did was to re-analyse and re-interpret evidence that the Pentagon and CIA had already analysed. Cheney's group prioritized evidence from unreliable sources such as exiled Kurdish nationalists and downgraded the UNMOVIC and IAEA reports. As far as corroboration from 6 different countries, they didn't corroborate anything; they supported the US analysis based on the reputations of the US intelligence community with assurances of "trust me, there's more". Foreign intelligence agencies were not given access to the raw data, only staged, re-analysed marketing collateral from the Dick Cheney White House. This is the group that presented Winnebegos of Mass Destruction and aluminum tubes as hard evidence. Most of it was not more reliable or threatening than Colin Powell's little bag of corn starch he waved around at the UNSC meeting. This was just window dressing a war served up for Shepard Smith to cheer lead for Fox News.
  
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16. Re:You know, I'll forgive them for this mistake by Hatta · 2012-10-09 03:21 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  The top three intel agencies told their leaders what they wanted to hear. They were clever enough to know that if they didn't they would be circumvented or ignored. If the Bush administration had honestly wanted to determine if there were WMDs, they would have given Hans Blix a few months to do his job. There was no urgency except in the fevered imaginations of neocons.
  
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17. Re:You know, I'll forgive them for this mistake by Anonymous Coward · 2012-10-09 03:33 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  Maybe they can embed this cylinder in the hole in Dick Cheney's carapace, where he used to have a heart.
  Dude, no! That'd make Dick Cheney just one step closer to being Iron Man! What is WRONG with you?
18. Re:You know, I'll forgive them for this mistake by dgatwood · 2012-10-09 03:52 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  Maybe they can embed this cylinder in the hole in Dick Cheney's carapace, where he used to have a heart.
  Wrong hole.
  
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19. Re:You know, I'll forgive them for this mistake by Gizzmonic · 2012-10-09 03:52 · Score: 2
  
  The real reason the neocons wanted Saddam gone was that the no fly zone was expensive
  Yup, so expensive compared to fighting a protracted 'police action' on the ground for decades! Those neocons, they're nothing if not thrifty. They also seem to have a real penchant for strengthening Iran. Heckuva job!
  
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  (-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
20. Re:You know, I'll forgive them for this mistake by deimtee · 2012-10-09 03:56 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  They don't particulaly want to get the oil from the M.E. The war drives up the price of oil.
  Do you think that when oil jumps from $40/barrel to $120/barrel, the cost of production in unrelated oilfields magically triples? Or is it more likely that they just make a sweet extra $80/barrel?
  When you ask "cui bono?" sometimes you have to think a little deeper.
  
  --
  I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen...
21. Re:You know, I'll forgive them for this mistake by naudiac · 2012-10-09 10:14 · Score: 2
  
  Would that then make him "Iron Dick"...?
22. Re:You know, I'll forgive them for this mistake by ace37 · 2012-10-09 11:06 · Score: 2
  
  THAT'S who canceled Firefly!
23. Re:You know, I'll forgive them for this mistake by tnk1 · 2012-10-10 02:57 · Score: 2
  
  I didn't say the plan worked as well as they would like, and I am not defending the invasion, but I find the talk about "war for oil" discussions to ignore the fact that the war didn't help out the oil companies at all, nor would any sane businessman expect that a war would help. Saddam was not the reason we weren't getting oil from Iraq, the sanctions were. If the Republicans wanted to cave into their presumed oil company masters, they'd just shitcan the sanctions. I think the war for oil thesis is a serious problem because it's sound-byte friendly nature very effectively deflects attention away from what actually happened. I'd have been happier if we'd fought for oil, because then at least, that's a valid strategic reason for fighting a war. Instead, we fought a war based on idealism, which is much, much worse.
  And on the face of it, I can see how they might have thought it could work. The war against Saddam Hussein went very, very well. He was easily toppled, just as expected. The problem was, the neocons also thought that everyone would have been pleased to set up a nice democratic state, after thanking the US for their freedom, and we'd ship out next year. There was no plan for what happened when that perfect scenario didn't happen. The best case scenario might have actually happened in 1991 before we threw the resistance to the dogs and let Saddam shut them down, but in 2003, you could completely forget about it.
  As for Iran, you may look at this as strengthening Iran, but eventually the Saddam Hussein regime (or that of his son) was going to fall. The chaos that would ensue in Iraq would serve Iran more than what we gave them. Sure, there is chaos, but there were also tens of thousands of US troops on the ground. Iraq may well not be a great friend to the US after this occupation, but Iran was also not allowed to run free like they would have if they had sponsored the coming revolution. We assume that what happened was the worst possible outcome, but it was definitely not. The US invasion may not have achieved complete success, but it did assure an independent Iraq, which would not necessarily have happened if things had been allowed to follow their course.
Weeks long hunt? by slackware+3.6 · 2012-10-09 01:47 · Score: 3, Insightful

And how much are they going to be billed for the cost of law enforcment to find their cylinder. Or to they just get a freebie?
1. Re:Weeks long hunt? by TheSpoom · 2012-10-09 01:49 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  C'mon, it's Halliburton. They're charging law enforcement for the privilege of helping them.
  
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probably a fake by slashmydots · 2012-10-09 01:49 · Score: 5, Interesting

Considering how bad it makes them look, I think they made another one, planted it on the road, and pretended to find it. Usually things like radioactive cylinders are secured enough to not go flying off a truck.
Doh by Anonymous Coward · 2012-10-09 01:59 · Score: 5, Funny

Now every time I see the opening credits to the Simpsons when Homer's driving home and finds a misplaced glowing radioactive rod stuck to his back and throws it out the window I'll think of Halliburton.
3 weeks? by davidwr · 2012-10-09 02:00 · Score: 2

What's that in half-lives?
Related: What's the half-life of your job when you lose nuclear material like this?

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Chief Suspect by puddingebola · 2012-10-09 02:03 · Score: 2

I suspect Jerry Jones. He probably heard he could use it to power the new big screen TV in Cowboys stadium. Radiation exposure explains the offense's play in last Monday night's game with the Bears.
Good news, bad news by Anonymous Coward · 2012-10-09 02:07 · Score: 5, Funny

[Cave Johnson voice]
The good news is, we found the radioactive cylinder, and you're not being fired for losing it. The bad news is, you're moving to Reeves County, Texas, and your new job is exterminating giant, glowing insects.
[/Cave Johnson voice]
are they gonna pay for it? by AnAlchemist · 2012-10-09 03:18 · Score: 2

And I bet they're not gonna pay a penny of the extra costs to the local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies. We're gonna pay for it, via taxes.
What took them so long? by webdog314 · 2012-10-09 05:29 · Score: 2

Maybe I'm not quite understanding the situation, but couldn't you just put a reasonably sensitive geiger counter on a truck and slowly drive it down the same road until you get a spike?
Re:Mod Parent Up! by Hatta · 2012-10-09 09:49 · Score: 2

Hans Blix found nothing because there was nothing to find. If Bush & Co wanted proof, they could have given Blix the few months he asked for. Besides, if you're going to use flaunting UN agreements as a justification for war, you should probably let the guy from the UN do his fucking job first.
To answer your question though, how long should we put up with a country flaunting UN resolutions before we wage war with them? For as long as it takes for the UN to agree to take action. If you want to use the UN as an excuse, you have to take it through UN channels. Whether Iraq follows UN agreements is not our business, it's the Security Council's business. If you're going to proceed unilaterally, it's dishonest to use the UN as justification for your aggression.
And there's no mythology that's been built up. All of this was perfectly clear to anyone who paid attention in 2003.

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Re:Mod Parent Up! by Hatta · 2012-10-09 11:07 · Score: 2

In other words, he says that Iraq has not complied with the terms of 1441
Surely he didn't. But how does it follow that the appropriate response is a unilateral military occupation? There was still no imminent threat from Iraq, nor was there any legitimate reason to believe there was.
Right, and with China, Russia, and France having lucrative oil contracts in Iraq under the OFF program, of course they weren't eager to disrupt the flow of those funds
And? So? It's the UN's choice whether to enforce the UN's resolutions. You can't say on one hand "Iraq has to abide by UN resolutions" and on the other hand say "the UN doesn't matter". If the UN isn't a legitimate governing body, come up with some non UN based justifications for the war. If the UN is a legitimate governing body, then let them govern. You can't have it both ways.
Unless that's your aim, you should probably stop it, and go read up on the actual facts surrounding the case
What facts are in dispute? You've presented none. I got my news from the same place everyone else did in 2003, cable news.

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