Based on our ongoing investigations into instances of questionable care at Tripler Army Medical Center, I didn't expect officials there to be overjoyed at the prospect of talking to us for future stories, but the top command at Tripler is engaging in a level of stonewalling that demands answers.

Readers may recall that Advertiser reporter Rob Perez did a multipart series last year about care at Tripler that showed that the federal government has spent tens of millions of dollars over the past two decades to resolve about 170 cases in which patients or their families accused the hospital of shoddy care. (Read the series at www.honoluluadvertiser.com/current/ln/tripler.) After initially agreeing to cooperate and answer some questions that would explain its side of the story in response to the series, Tripler simply stopped providing information.

If hospital officials thought the series unfair, it certainly wasn't apparent when Maj. Gen. Gale Pollack, then the commander at Tripler and the head of the Pacific Regional Medical Command, wrote The Advertiser to thank us for the series while promising to do better. However, when Pollack went on to take temporary command of Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, she wrote an internal e-mail to staff that alleged "the media makes money on negative stories, not by articulating the positive in life."

Pollack's successor, Maj. Gen. Carla Hawley-Bowland, who wasn't in charge when the Tripler series appeared, must share those beliefs.

In March, The Advertiser contacted Tripler to see if reporter William Cole could talk to a few soldiers receiving care for combat-related injuries. The reason we wanted to do the story was because military hospitals were being checked nationwide by government teams after dilapidated facilities and bureaucratic bungling were discovered at Walter Reed.

Cole told Mindy Anderson, a Tripler public affairs officer, that he wanted to ask Hawley-Bowland about a range of issues at the hospital.

During the course of the phone interview, Cole brought up the highly publicized case of Izzy Peterson, who as a newborn was given carbon dioxide instead of oxygen at birth at Tripler in 2005, and whose case was documented in Perez's series.

Shortly after the phone interview and just before Cole planned to visit Tripler to conduct his interviews, Cole was informed that they had been canceled.

Anderson, the public affairs official, explained to Cole that his interview questions with Hawley-Bowland had gone "off subject" and there would be no meeting.

After I got involved in a conference call with Cole, Hawley-Bowland and Anderson, the Tripler officials denied they had called off the interviews because of Cole's mention of the Baby Izzy case and said the interviews were canceled because the soldiers' schedules had changed that day. The interviews were then rescheduled.

We received a pledge that day from Hawley-Bowland that Tripler would be cooperative. But earlier this month, Perez did another story on Tripler, focusing on the suicide of an Air Force veteran who suffered from bipolar disorder and jumped from a 10th-floor balcony not far from where he worked as a ward clerk at Tripler. He had made two Tripler emergency room visits. During the first, he waited five hours and never saw a psychiatrist. During the second, he waited three hours and left angry because he had not seen a physician. A week after the second visit, he was dead.

Perez called Tripler four times for comment the day before the story ran. Three voicemail messages left for Anderson were not returned; nor was a page request for someone from public affairs, not even the following day. Anderson sent out a release the day the story appeared to an e-mail address that was discontinued a year ago. She declined to say why she could not return our phone calls.

And then 10 days ago, reporter Rick Daysog wrote the story about Tripler having to pay $9.4 million to the family of a 3-year-old boy who suffered massive brain damage while being treated at Tripler. Anderson used the same discontinued e-mail address and did not return Daysog's phone calls or e-mails.

The reason to write about what might seem an internal squabble is to give readers — many of them critical of our Tripler coverage — a sense of what we have had to deal with seeking the simplest of answers from this important medical institution.

With 3,000 employees on staff and about 200 military physicians, Tripler has positive stories about the way it is helping a population base of about 400,000 people across a vast section of the Pacific. But its command sees no benefit in letting the media know about what good it does or conversely, provides no clue about what happens when things go wrong.