Just a reminder for those who say this should not be dismissed or ridiculed as another conspiracy theory: This expression comes from the subtitle of the article Freda has posted in the first post and is repeated in the article. That's where it started.

I have come to thoroughly dislike the way conspiracy theories are posted here in Mudcat. I even had thought of posting a parody of a conspiracy theory immediately after the death of Nick Berg. But I thought that would have been too gross and nobody would buy it, so it let slip by the opportunity. Well, sometimes the reality is weirder than my phantasies.

If you look closely at the different bits of information Freda has posted what strikes immediately is the lack of coherence, a complete lack of evaluation and the juxtaposition of irrelevancies as if these things had some connection.

A few examples:

- The Berg family has complained and blamed the Bush government for Nick's death.
This bit of information is true but refers to keeping Nick for longer in custody than necessary and letting him out when the danger was high. Read in the context of the conspiracy theory, this gets a kind of sinister touch and that is the effect wanted.

- The video is edited and the man may have been dead before the decapitation.
Quite probably true, but noone has claimed in the video that the man was alive at that moment. That was a quick inference which may be wrong, so what?

- The murderer may not be the man boasting about it.
Possibly true. When hooded terrorists claim responsibility and tell the police the name of a main responsible, I'd bet they lie to save themselves. Give the Bush government a wrong name with some plausibility and you may send them down the wrong path. If the man named is actually dead (but nobody knows for sure) all the better. He will not protest the wrong accusation.

- The man on the far left stands in the familiar "at ease" military posture.
That's a really damning piece of evidence. Noone else outside of the US Army has ever been watched in such a posture. And surely noone of Saddam's former army could possibly be among the five hoods.

The trademark of such theories is the stringing together of truths, halftruths, wild guesses (the words in 'English' for instance, you have to listen to them to hear how laughable that is) and completely irrelevant observations as if all these things have anything to do with each other. People doing these stringing together jobs go for the effect. The idea is to make more claims than anyone could check himself and to hope that 'where smoke is there is fire' will win the day once more.

People spreading these theories do not even see the most glaring contradictions. If it is true that the killers have offered to the Bush government exchange of prisoners, then the other part of the story (the killing was staged by Americans) makes no sense.

It is not the case that I completely exclude one possibility, but when reading what Freda has posted I consider the arguments threadbare to the extreme. You must show me much more convincing evidence before I give this theory more than a 'extremely unlikely, but not thoroughly impossible'. And here it is where I depart from McGrath's we just don't have the information which would make it possible to determine what happened with any degree of confidence. Of course, we can assign a degree of confidence to such stories and we do it daily. We look at how they are presented, what they cite as evidence, how they argue, and if we find them wanting in all vital aspect we assign them a very low degree of confidence.

Do a bit of critical reading of the so called evidence above. I'd rather bet on a mediocre German team winning the Euro 2004 than on this conspiracy theory being true. Which does not mean I buy every single aspect of the alternative story. I have my doubt whether we actually know why he was there. If he was, for instance, an American spy, I'd expect the Americans to lie about that detail for the sake of all the people who might have talked with Berg.

Wolfgang