Halliburton's Missing Radioactive Cylinder Found 126
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."
You know, I'll forgive them for this mistake (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.
Re:You know, I'll forgive them for this mistake (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe they can embed this cylinder in the hole in Dick Cheney's carapace, where he used to have a heart.
Re:You know, I'll forgive them for this mistake (Score:4, Funny)
Umm, where do you think it came from--surely not the back of a truck?! That's the power cell for his animatronics!
Re:You know, I'll forgive them for this mistake (Score:5, 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.
Re:You know, I'll forgive them for this mistake (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?
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Re:You know, I'll forgive them for this mistake (Score:5, Funny)
Wrong hole.
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Anything else?
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Do the letters FO mean anything to you?
Faroe Islands...? Is there a conspiracy between them and Halliburton I'm not in on? I can't keep up with the mentally ill and their wacky conspiracy theories these days.
Re:You know, I'll forgive them for this mistake (Score:5, Informative)
What I won't forgive them for is a $2 trillion+ war and tens of thousands of lives lost
Not tens, hundreds [wikipedia.org]. Dick Cheney is responsible for the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives.
Re:You know, I'll forgive them for this mistake (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You know, I'll forgive them for this mistake (Score:5, 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.
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Fuck off, you don't know shit.
You start by saying "you guys really need to get a clue", and then proceed to waffle on without a shred of a clue.
Saddam? Plotting to destroy the US? What a joke. And by the way, he committed genocide against his own people when he used chemical weapons against them and Iranians during the Iran-Iraq war, while he was dictator backed and supported by the USA, who were the ones who encouraged him to start the war. No doubt they knew full well about his chemical weapons plans.
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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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Actually no, neocons don't really believe that. What they believe is that it will make a good story that enough terrified and uneducated nincompoops will believe, that they will be able to get enough public support to send thousands of your sons over to the other side of the world to kill and die, to boost the stock value of military and oil companies.
This poor fellow is just one of those.
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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
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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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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 se
Re:You know, I'll forgive them for this mistake (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Then think a little deeper on what you are suggesting. Oil companies don't authorize wars, politicians do. Yes, oil companies can exert influence, but most of that influence is in the way of money used to win campaigns.
However, if you raise the price of oil, you raise the price of gas at the pump. That's pure suicide for a politician, and they know that. Politicians still have to get votes, although money is extremely useful, it avails you nothing if you trash the economy. Who profits? Certainly not t
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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.
It wasn't the oil they were after, it was the oil *development* contracts. Iraq had an incredibly decrepit infrastructure in their oil industry going into the war, and there was billions to be made in being the company to upgrade that. But thanks to the sanctions against Husein, U.S. companies like Halliburton couldn't get in on that phat cash. Russian oil companies, meanwhile, didn't have to deal with those sanctions. Halliburton's assumption was that Hussein would be overthrown, the sanctions lifted, the
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Then why didn't they use their influence with the US government to drop the sanctions? You'd think that would be about ten times easier to achieve than getting politicians to fight a war. No one wanted the sanctions any more anyway. All sorts of governments like France and others were already applying pressure to have them dropped. The US could have easily cut a diplomatic deal to get Halliburton it's contracts without getting one US soldier killed.
This is why I shake my head at the whole "war for oil"
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Precisely, why was a war needed to boost the stock of oil companies?
Their problem was the petrodollar. When Saddam and Khadaffi wanted to trade oil in Euro instead of declining, debt-ridden dollar (puke), they signed their death warrants. That was because the otherwise worthless currency reaquires backing in a scarce resource of high demand. Now Khamenei (yes, Ahmadinejad is just a figurehead with no real influence) wants to develop Iran's own oil market [wikipedia.org], so guess what has already been happening (Iran wants WMDs, yeah sure).
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Correlation does not imply causation.
You're pointing to a graph and saying, "since Exxon made a profit, they must have started the war". You might as well point to the economic success of the US in the later half of the 20th Century as being proof that the US maneuvered Japan into bombing Pearl Harbor. However, both of those events would likely have happened for their own reasons even without a war.
Anything happening in the Middle East would have driven the profit chart up, because their profits are due t
Re:You know, I'll forgive them for this mistake (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.
Re:You know, I'll forgive them for this mistake (Score:5, 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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It still makes no sense to me that Cheney was somehow able to avoid any responsibility for these events.
It makes perfect sense to me: Obama is trying to protect himself from being prosecuted for his crimes by not prosecuting Cheney (and Bush) for their crimes.
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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
Re:You know, I'll forgive them for this mistake (Score:5, 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 [wikipedia.org] or ignored [wikipedia.org]. 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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Those intel agencies were told to get evidence of WMDS and not come back until they did. Not surprisingly, they managed to find what they were ordered to find. Meanwhile, the actual U.N. inspectors said he had none, so they were pulled out and told to shut up. Meanwhile, he had no credible ability to actually deliver those WMDs to any U.S. target. Not even if he strapped 5 scuds together and fueled them with wishful thinking.
If you want to find the others who actually believe a word of the excuses, you'll f
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Not to mention that Saddam Hussein's Sunni government was not friendly with Iran's Shia government Now there is a Shia government in Iraq which frees up Iran to pay more attention to other things like Israel.
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Tony Blair was just a fawning puppy who'd do anything to get himself on the world stage. The man isn't nearly as smart as his publicity would like us to believe but nonetheless , he still dragged the UK into yet another idiotic american adventure in the middle east for absolutely no reason whatsoever other than his arrogance, hubris and an ego the size of Iraq that needs to constantly be fed.
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Agreed. The Downing Street Memo proves he knew the illegality of his actions and did it anyway.
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Thank you grandson Cheney...
You've always had him (Score:1)
Re:You know, I'll forgive them for this mistake (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Mod Parent Up! (Score:2)
Even at the time, a clear headed look at the intelligence told you everything you needed to know. The people who were actually in Iraq, e.g., Hans Blix found no evidence of any ongoing WMD project. The only so called evidence came from Cheney's personal, in house, Office of Special plans, which was always nothing more than a markting agency for the war.
It was clear as day in 2003, and it's clear as day now. The entire argument for the war in Iraq was fraudulent.
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In a just world, the bill would go directly to Bush and Cheney as an odious debt.
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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 th
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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
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The only evidence of WMD programs came from Dick Cheney's special intel unit that didn't have ANY new data.
That's not entirely true: There were somewhat new completely unsupported assertions from a guy named Ahmed Chalabi who probably thought that he was convincing the US to remove Saddam Hussein and put Chalabi in charge.
Also worthy of mention: Colin Powell, when given the intelligence he was initially supposed to present at the UN, reportedly responded with something like "This is bullshit" (and Powell gives the impression of being someone who doesn't normally use that kind of language). The silly stuff about
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Much of the same tale can be said about North Korea and their nuclear bomb development program. According to experts and boots on the ground, they had absolutely no weapons program. Furthermore, if such a program existed, it was only in the conceptual planning stage. This was in spite of leaks indicating they not only had an active program, but that it was rather far along. Less than a year later, North Korea set off their first nuclear weapon. Oppps.
People act as if intelligence is 100% reliable or perfect
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Much of the same tale can be said about North Korea and their nuclear bomb development program. According to experts and boots on the ground, they had absolutely no weapons program.
Fucking citation. NOW!
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They didn't bid! It was a No-Bid contract negotiated behind closed doors. The only other contractor involved was Bechtel and they weren't bidding. In fact, nobody to date has disclosed what their involvement in the process was. The Iraq war took our focus off Tora Bora where we had Al Queda and Bin Laden pinned down. Saddam was an asshole but that doesn't change the fact that we went into Iraq for all the wrong reasons and at exactly the wrong time.
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The war there was in no way the final option resulting from years of failed sanctions, failed diplomacy, and ineffective UN inspections & oversight.
Yes, all the failures led to the war. But they failed - ON PURPOSE.
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There might have been some dirty dealings with Halliburton, but the Iraq War was far from a corporate conspiracy.
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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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You just broke the Tin Foil Hat meter.
Have you been handling radioactive cylinders?
Re:You know, I'll forgive them for this mistake (Score:4, 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.
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THAT'S who canceled Firefly!
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You do realize that Clinton and Obama both give Halliburton no-bid contracts right? In fact, Halliburton even lost a bid once, but Clinton gave them the contract anyways. I don't see any indication at all that they were treated any differently under Dubya than anybody else.
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Only on DailyKOS or slashdot would this be seen as "Insightful" and not flamebait/troll.
Apparently Dick Cheney has the Emperor-like ability to control the minds of his political opponents in different places in space AND TIME (since you'll notice many of these comments predate his arrival as the Liberal's favorite Shylock in 2000)?:
"One way or the other, we are determined to deny Iraq the capacity to develop weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver them. That is our bottom line." President Cl
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"People who were lied to"
By whom?
You're asserting, then that Pres Clinton, VP Gore, etc were all "being lied to" *before* Bush2 and Cheney were elected, and were merely guiltless dupes, yet Cheney (who was also a VP) wasn't LIKEWISE duped, but was instead the evil mastermind of this whole plan in order to increase the value of his holdings in Haliburton?
Seriously?
BTW the Left (as I assume you are) loves to use the term "War Criminal" as a synonym for "people I really don't like"...but in the real world, you
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Because the rest of the world waits anxiously every day to hear your musings and judgements.
And to respond to them.
and nothing of value was found? (Score:1)
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+++ Insert discworld in drive A: +++
Weeks long hunt? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Weeks long hunt? (Score:5, Funny)
C'mon, it's Halliburton. They're charging law enforcement for the privilege of helping them.
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Ha, Halliburton will probably get a fat government contract to clean it up.
probably a fake (Score:5, Interesting)
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Usually things like radioactive cylinders are secured enough to not go flying off a truck.
Yeah, and nuclear reactors are maintained well enough so they don't have football-sized holes in their reactor vessels.
Not that I have zero faith in modern management, but I won't rule out any level of human stupidity these days.
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> "Oh yeah, because a huge company has NEVER done anything similar to that ever!"
[citation needed]
[identity needed to honor request]
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Including pacemakers makes that category sound less dangerous than it may actually be. These things contain plutonium....
http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/miscellaneous/pacemaker.htm [orau.org]
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So do cigarettes. And while cigarettes aren't exactly healthy, I don't think anyone's worried about carrying them in their shirt pocket.
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First of all: another reason to stop smoking.
And then I doubt that they contain enough radioactive isotopes for the decay heat is measureable at all, let alone useable to power a device.
i didn't want to sound too alarmistic by stating that those pacemakers contain lots of plutonium, but if you compare it to cigarettes, it should be ok to say, that those pacemakers contain HUGE amounts of Pu.
As an intresting fact. The radioactivity contained in one cigarette was used as a comparision value for the amount of
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I guess the medical bills can be sent to the U.S. government. The only way tobacco could contain plutonium is from nuclear testing, it isn't otherwise found in nature.
The pacemakers with plutonium have been phased out, though a few people still have them (I think).
Doh (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.
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I wonder if some punk kid on a skateboard found this cylinder...
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I wonder if some punk kid on a skateboard found this cylinder...
One, did, yes. Later that afternoon, a 24-year-old infant used it as a pacifier.
Halliburton acicidentally did good for once? (Score:2)
Does this mean that we can at least look forward to a sudden cluster of blind superheroes in Texas in about 15 years?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daredevil_(Marvel_Comics) [wikipedia.org]
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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.
If you hadn't said that, I wouldn't have thought Halliburton every time from now on. Thanks. Thanks. A. Lot. :)
3 weeks? (Score:2)
What's that in half-lives?
Related: What's the half-life of your job when you lose nuclear material like this?
Wow, my shit-hole home town actually mentioned. (Score:1)
Nice place to not live anymore.
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Still, at least slightly better than Pecos. Still have family in both.
Chief Suspect (Score:3)
Good news, bad news (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]
One thing to love about slashdot... (Score:2)
Texas, eh? (Score:1)
I was expecting it to show up in satellite footage captured over Iran ... you know, in case the UN needs proof.
are they gonna pay for it? (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.
No doubt ... (Score:2)
What took them so long? (Score:3)
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?
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That's how I would have done it, too. You'd presumably have GPS tracks from the trucks, and various ANPR/CCTV sightings along the route. Some sort of camera and Geiger counter on a small van with the truck's route programmed into a GPS would take you to it. Well, assuming it hasn't been found and moved.
In other news, there isn't a fallen-off exhaust pipe or silencer to be found in a big swathe across America's roads ;-)
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For all of the hoopla over it, these types of sources are actually pretty weak. I don't know the activity level of this particular one, but most likely you'd have to put it in your pocket and walk around with it for a day or three for any measurable damage to happen. I haven't read that much about this actual situation, but they probably tried that before they even bothered calling in the National Guard. It most likely bounced far enough from the road that it wasn't detectable this way. No matter how sensit
At last! How the Halliburton board can get back to (Score:2)
their regular duties. You know, pouring defective cement casings on offshore oil wells, building US military bases on other people's lands, and chopping up the remains of the Iraqi oil industry.
or did they? (Score:1)
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mod parent up (Score:1)