Nope, not a joke. Half the George Washington University campus is closed off, roped off with yellow and red police tape. News trucks in the traffic circle. Police everywhere. In an earlier incident, after a 4 hour standoff, a man jumped from the roof of the GW Hospital, according to an eyewitness I spoke to. But why the other cordoned off areas across campus? Why the police everywhere with bomb-sniffing dogs? He said that bombs had been suspected everywhere. Why? He didn't know. But on Pennsylvania Ave (also closed off--and it's a major thoroughfare), I heard a cop tell a young woman that a doctor had phoned in that he was 'treating Osama Bin Laden'--and that 'suspect Arab-looking guys' had been spotted 'all over campus' (I spotted two down in the subway myself, lurking in the darkened tunnels, in fact).

Nothing on TV news or internet when I got home. Going back outside to hear what I can. Will update if I learn anything.

I would rate this story about .001 % likelihood of any basis in reality. On the other hand, it says a lot for GWU Hospital if true! What a dialysis program they must have...

UPDATE:

Nope, found out nothing more. The area where the jumper landed is still surrounded by red tape. There are still a few police cars and forensics experts going over the scene. There is also still a heavy police presence. Let me see if I can convey to you just how abnormal all this is.

I have seen several murder and accident scenes here, usually on sidewalks or streets. Normal procedure is for the body to be taken away after the area is photographed and gone over for clues. Often this is a shockingly brief process. The main priority is to get traffic moving again, and normally the only police presence after such an event is a motorcycle cop or two directing traffic and making sure the red-taped area is not disturbed. That's not what's gone on or what's going on. There has been zero concern for traffic or for the hordes of tourists forced into detours.

Areas of central DC--including the GW campus--are often closed down. For a while VP Cheney was arriving by motorcade every afternoon at the hospital to have his heart checked; security was tight, but the hospital was never cordoned off. There were at least 8 separate blocks around the hosiptal today cordoned off at least partially today that I saw, that were checked by dogs. This did not happen even when the street in front of the hospital caught fire (again, I'm not kidding--a demolition bulldozer smashed a gas line, leaking liquid natural gas into 23rd Street--the entire block of the street then caught fire when a motorist threw a cigarette out a car window. I witnessed this--quite a sight). That day the whole area was evacuated, but there was no security presence or cordoned satellite blocks like today.

Normally a 4-hour standoff culminating in a suicide leap is covered live by local news here. No news trucks or cameras were allowed near the standoff scene today--they were confined to the traffic circle--and I witnessed several tourists being discouraged from taking photos by policemen. The fact that it's not even being mentioned on the local evening news--in a city which morbidly feeds on news--is highly suspect in itself. So is the fact that there's still this much security and this many police cars here this many hours after the event took place.

And finally, I've been caught in many huge lockdowns of the Washington Metro and parts of central DC. They are NEVER mentioned in the news, unless a chemical bomb or anthrax attack is suspected.The Dept of Homeland Security has total censorship rights over the local media. I've asked a neighbor (who worked for FEMA and was absorbed into DHS, then quit in disgust) why this affected false alarms, and he told me it was because the security services didn't want terrorists to 'learn their response procedures'. I guess they're hoping to confuse them with miles of red (and yellow) tape.

So end of story. SOMETHING unusual happened here today, but I guess we'll never know what. And I agree the cop was probably making a joke to a pretty girl about the Bin Laden angle. On the other hand it's a joke that would have cost him his job if a real journalist had been passing by.

UPDATE 2: Monday morning. Saw a team of military forensics experts filing into the hospital this morning as I went down the Metro escalator (GWH and the Foggy Bottom Metro stop share an entance.)
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