Oddly, four days after the Cameron investigation ran, all traces of his report -- transcripts, Web links, headlines -- disappeared from the Foxnews.com archives. (Normally, Fox leaves a story up for two to three weeks before consigning it to the pay archive.) When Le Monde contacted Fox in March for a copy of the original tapes, Fox News spokesmen said the request posed a problem but would not elaborate. (Fox News now says Le Monde never called.) Asked why the Cameron piece disappeared, spokesman Robert Zimmerman said it was "up there on our Web site for about two or three weeks and then it was taken down because we had to replace it with more breaking news. As you know, in a Web site you've got x amount of bandwidth -- you know, x amount of stuff you can put stuff up on [sic]. So it was replaced. Normal course of business, my friend." (In fact, a text-based story on a Web site takes up a negligible amount of bandwidth.)
When informed that Cameron's story was gone from the archives, not simply from the headline pages (when you entered the old URL, a Fox screen appeared with the message "This story no longer exists"), Zimmerman replied, "I don't know where it is."
The DEA report on which the French journals based their investigations contained a wealth of remarkable tales. To take just a few samples: (...listed...)So it went week after week, month after month, for more than a year and a half. In addition to the locations mentioned above, there were "art student" encounters in Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Detroit, El Paso, Los Angeles, Miami, Orlando, New Orleans, Phoenix, San Diego, Little Rock, Seattle, Washington, D.C., Arlington, Texas, Albuquerque, and dozens of other small cities and towns.
This is deceptive. All the stories did not sound anything like these - the "students" "sighted" were in malls, all sorts of businesses and residences, which sounded like they were selling candy door-to-door. There is interviews of some of the sellers, and they sounded like they were worried about their "work" visas.
The whole report sounded paranoid and fixed, though there might be interesting incidents. IMO of special interest there may have been a concern about the Ecstasy issue - note that it was the "DEA" and not "FBI" involved.