Reply #17: My "assumptions" are based on common sense reasoning...

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

...about human nature. Soldiers are human beings, not robots. Three hundred soldiers don't simply disappear off the face of the earth without many people noticing. They have families, and they talk to them. They tell them about what they're doing, where they're staying, etc. And a lot of their families live together on bases or near bases, and they talk to each other, too. For the Army to be covering up these deaths, they would need to be faking extremely personal communications, including phone calls, from three hundred people back to their families whilst simultaneously silencing every single person who knew about the coverup (read every single person who didn't die in the explosion/fire) lest they tell anybody about it. But even then you're still left with the problem that there are several hundred people who ain't ever coming home, so you've still got the same problem even if you did somehow manage to make the coverup work.

So I don't see where reporters enter into this at all. Reporters or no reporters, there simply isn't any way to cover up something like this.