Anti-American@US Embassy. Baghdad

I'm John Owens, the guy that worked on the US Embassy in Baghdad for 71/2 months from Nov.05 to July 06. When I spoke to congress on C-Span about the problems with the contractor FKTC and OBO about labor abuse and trafficking, it was a small portion of the problems I saw there. Mary French was the most incompetent project manager I ever saw and should be brought up on criminal charges for a wide variety of reasons. How could a project director run a job site of that magnitude without any kind of safety program. I was on site everyday and I never saw one safety meeting. I think every labor law on the books was broken on that site, not to mention human and civil rights violations. Again, another reason they didn't want Americans on that job. The fact that she was not qualified to manage the project was the reason she got the job. She let FKTC do anything they wanted to do, and get away with shoddy and substandard workmanship as well as endangering peoples lives. This was partly because she didn't know any better and also because Jim Golden and Ret.General Williams of Overseas Building Operations told her to. I was amazed when I got there and saw OBO (US Government)only had a handful of people overseeing the job, and none of them had ever been on a embassy construction site before. Not including a few security people, there were only four people who were supposed to be supervising FKTC. The mechanical superintendent was from the Navy, he worked on ships boilers and had never been on an Embassy project before. There was a guy from another company "not OBO" who looked after electrical part time, then there was Juvencio Lopez who was there to supervise the staff housing buildings and didn't seem to have a clue about embassy construction. I think it was around April or May 06 when OBO ( Golden & Williams) brought in around twenty Malaysian or Indonesian engineers and secretaries (none had a security clearance), Golden's wife was Indonesian and I'm told that’s how they got the job. I heard the logistics manager Jim Schofield also had a Indonesian wife. Schofield wasn't allowed on site much because Mary French didn't like him and FKTC hated him, FKTC did not want any Americans on the job, that's why I was the only one on site who worked for FKTC. I guess they thought they could control me, and I'd keep quiet the same way they controlled Mary. So, we had inexperienced primary contractor whose management staff was made up of about 95% Lebanese and twenty or so Indonesian staff for the State Dept. responsible for building the largest and most fortified US Embassy in the world. I would say the only time most of these people had ever even been in a US Embassy was to get turned down for a visa to the states, they certainly didn't have a clue how to build one. I could write a book on this, I mean, who would think you find could Anti-Americanism on a US Embassy Construction Project. I have a lot of information about that job if the American public found out about, well, they would probably really get angry, think about all the skilled American tradesmen in the states who would have gone over there and built an Embassy that wouldn't be condemned before it's occupied, too bad Americans weren't allowed to work there, they just send tax dollars for foreigners who don't seem to like Americans, only American dollars.