award or reward?

Secretary of State Colin Powell presented George P. Shultz with the American
Foreign Service Association's (AFSA) Lifetime Achievement Award in a ceremony on June 26th.

Shultz served as Secretary of State in the Reagan Administration from 1982 until 1989, after which he rejoined Stanford University as the Jack Steele Parker Professor of International Economics at the Graduate School of Business and as a distinguished fellow at the Hoover Institution.

He is a member of the board of directors of the Bechtel Group, Fremont Group, Gilead Sciences, Unext.com, and Charles Schwab & Co. He is also chairman of the International Council of J. P. Morgan Chase and on the advisory committee of Infrastructureworld.

Yup. That would be the same Bechtel Group that is currently busy with reconstruction in Iraq. There is no mention of Shultz sitting on the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee in the article. Has he stepped down to spend more time with his family?

On June 18, Rumsfeld announced that Tillie K. Fowler will serve as the new chair of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, filling the seat previously held by Richard Perle.

Perle, however, is still on the DPBAC. In May, Ken Silverstein and Chuck Neubauer reported in the Los Angeles Times Consulting and Overlap, that Richard Perle's business partner, Gerald Hillman, now joins him at the DPBAC. Perle's loss of the chairmanship and its prestige must be soothed by this new addition. By the way, Hillman has no known experience in national security or defense.

Grant, contract, award, or all of the above?

Who is implementing the construction side of this project?

The Department of State's U. S. Global Technology Corps (USGTC) -- a program administered by the Bureau of International Information Programs, Office of Technology Partnerships -- is providing computer technology and training to medical students in Baghdad, Iraq as part of a joint public diplomacy initiative with the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.

On June 24, 2003, USGTC partner WiRED International (World Internet Resources for Education and Development) inaugurated a ten workstation computer center with a 130 disk CD-ROM health education library at the Medical City Center of the University of Baghdad, the largest teaching hospital in Iraq. Dr. Gary Selnow, executive director of WiRED International and a former Fulbright professor, presided at the opening ceremony joined by James K. Haveman, the Coalition Provisional Authority's Senior Adviser to the Ministry of Health, and Dr. Saeb Saddiq, Director General of Medical City Center.

[...]

Three similar medical information centers will be established this week at two other teaching hospitals in Baghdad, and at the Spinal Cord Center, a specialty clinic for severe neurological injuries. CD libraries of current health education materials will provide the initial content for the centers, in anticipation of Internet access as the infrastructure to support it comes on line.

An interesting detail over at the Global Technology Corps. The site labels itself "A Program of the US Department of State". On the Global Technology Corps website they include a link to a report written by the Heritage Foundation: Spreading Freedom - Building Democracy and Public Diplomacy.

Curious though, the Heritage Foundation link at the Global Technology Corps website is currently inactive. But the Way Back Machine satisfied our curiosity and that's the link provided above. By the way, the report "Spreading Freedom - Building Democracy and Public Diplomacy" was part of Issues 2000, The Candidate's Briefing Book

Why should a link to one lone report bother us at bpost, you ask? The Heritage Foundation includes amongst its financial supporters the Bechtel Foundation, the non-profit arm of the Bechtel Group.

Company For Iraq Medical Information Centers
Subcontractors
Award unknown
Agency U.S. Global Technology Corps, a program of the U.S. Department of State; Department of State's Bureau of International Information Programs, Office of Technology Partnerships; the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, and the Office of the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs (previous NIH grant funding developed the software)
Partner WiRED International
Date of RFP
Pre-planning
Date of Award
Nature of work To provide Iraq's healthcare community with access to information about the latest developments in human medicine. Phase One: Opening Medical Information Centers that offer comprehensive medical e-libraries on CD-ROMS in 3 Baghdad area hospitals as well as the Spinal Cord Center.
References
WiRed International website
26 June 2003

US Department of State
Media Note
June 26, 2003