EL PASO -- I was inside the Washington, D.C., Beltway on Nov. 29, when CBS News broke the story, planted by the FBI, that as many as 200 bodies of murder victims were buried at a ranch near Ciudad Juarez, across the U.S-Mexico border from El Paso.

U.S. newspapers and broadcast media jumped onto the report instantly, claiming that investigators from both countries were digging for "hundreds of bodies." They pinned the supposed murders on "the Juarez drug cartel." Using the analogy of the genocide committed by communist dictator Pol Pot in Cambodia, several news reports chose to describe the border region as "the killing fields."

[continues 691 words]