Informed Consent

Wash Post Reporter Spent Hundreds of Hours at Walter Reed Hospital Without Drawing Suspicion

A Washington Post reporter who co-wrote the recent stories about mistreatment of vets at the Walter Reed Hospital told an audience of journalists today that she and a colleague spent months at the hospital without ever drawing suspicion.

Anne Hull said the Post stories began when her colleague Dana Priest received a simple tip from a source. After an initial visit to the hospital to observe the conditions and speak with patients, Hull and Priest launched their investigation, which had them on the hospital grounds for "hundreds and hundreds of hours" over four months without ever getting official permission to be there.

"We worked very stealthly and sort of under the radar," Hull said, noting that nobody ever asked who they were.

"It was an amazing, messed-up world," she said.

Hull, speaking to an audience at the American Society of Newspaper Editors conference in Washington, DC, also said that after the Post approached military officials for comment to the stories days before they published, the Pentagon responded by holding a press conference about the hospital without telling the Post reporters about it.

"It was essentially a pre-emptive strike to what we were doing," Hull said.

FBI to Censor Jack Anderson Papers

From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

During his life and career as a muckraking journalist in Washington, Jack Anderson cultivated secret sources throughout the halls of government -- sources who passed on information that allowed Anderson to investigate and write about Watergate, CIA assassination schemes, and countless scandals. His syndicated column, Washington Merry-Go-Round, earned him the enmity of the corrupt and powerful -- so much so that during the Watergate years, associates of Nixon had discussed assassinating the columnist. They never went through with the plot. Anderson died last December at the age of 83.

His archive, some 200 boxes now being held by George Washington University's library, could be a trove of information about state secrets, dirty dealings, political maneuverings, and old-fashioned investigative journalism, open for historians and up-and-coming reporters to see.

But the government wants to see the documents before anyone else.

Agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation have told university officials and members of the Anderson family that they want to go through the archive, and that agents will remove any item they deem confidential or top secret.

The Andersons, who have not yet transferred ownership of the archive to George Washington University, are outraged. They plan to fight the FBI's request.

Were he alive today, Jack Anderson "would probably come out of his skin at the thought of the FBI going through his papers," said Kevin N. Anderson, the journalist's son. If papers were taken -- even if some were stamped "declassified" and returned -- that would "destroy any academic, scholarly, and historic value" of the archive, Kevin Anderson adds.