On October 10, 2011, news broke at Davis-Besse that cracking in the concrete containment shield building had been discovered, during breaching operations to install the third lid in a decade atop the problem-plagued reactor. As revealed much more clearly by a photo included in a U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) report (but not until eight long months later!), that original cracking discovered was actually quite wide. The photo that NRC displayed prominently on its homepage, however, showed cracking that was more difficult to make out.

  FirstEnergy and NRC have called such concrete containment cracking “unique OE [Operating Experience].” But at Crystal River, Florida, however, a “self-inflicted wound” proved fatal – containment cracking due to a botched steam generator replacement so severe, the only fix would have been a multi-billion dollar containment replacement. Crystal River was permanently shutdown.

Over fourteen hundred international election experts gathered data last year and pronounced the United States last in election integrity among long-standing democracies. On a 100-point scale, the U.S. received an integrity rating of 69.3 percent -- one notch ahead of the narco-drug state Colombia at 69.1 percent and just behind the nearly-narco-drug state of Mexico at 69.8 percent, neither country with a long-standing democracy.

 "There are a lot of people in this room that are
on watch lists, with huge dossiers," Edward Snowden's colleague Jacob
Appelbaum warned a packed audience of international journalists and
diplomats, business executives, software experts and others here in
Bangkok at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Thailand.

"Not just me. Probably people you wouldn't imagine," Appelbaum said.

"I think that that's a problem. To have a secret police state society,
is really scary."

Appelbaum helped create -- and appears in -- "CITIZENFOUR" which won
Best Documentary at the Oscars on February 22 for portraying former
U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) subcontractor Snowden and the
information he smuggled out, revealing America's electronic spying on
the public worldwide.

The film was directed by Laura Poitras who Appelbaum assisted during
their joint initial interviews with Snowden online, encrypting their
conversations and confirming his NSA qualifications.

Appelbaum, a Californian, is based in Berlin.

This interview was conducted in Matanzas, Cuba. Part Two will follow in next week’s issue of BAR.

I met Manolo De Los Santos during a recent trip to Cuba organized by Code Pink, a grassroots peace and social justice movement working to end US funded wars and occupations. The interview took place in the coastal city of Matanzas, one of the sites of the 16th century Euro-American Human Trafficking Trade (termed by European traders and historians as the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade) at the Matanzas Evangelical Theological Seminary.