COOKING OUT WITH CONSPIRACY THEORIES

The Memorial Day weekend is upon us. It's time to take a break. We leave for ours with a couple of reminders.

One is entertaining: Jon Stewart's commencement address a couple of weeks ago at his alma mater, The College of William & Mary, where "roughly 13,000 people packed into William and Mary Hall" to hear him. His advice to newly minted graduates was, as he might say on "The Daily Show," not unenlightening. "Thank you Mr. President," he began, after receiving an honorary doctorate. "I had forgotten how crushingly dull these ceremonies are."

The other reminder is frightening: See fellow ArtsJournal blogger Kyle Gann's item from yesterday, "Have We Been Hoaxed?," about the Nick Berg decapitation video.

There IS something fishy going on, no question in my mind. But what? The main conspiracy theory going around is that the CIA (and other intelligence operatives?) made the video as disinformation propaganda either to blame terrorists for Nick Berg's death, which the CIA (and/or the U.S. military) was itself responsible for -- thus pulling off a horrific cover-up -- or to take attention away from the Abu Ghraib torture photos that were coming out at the time by showing that the enemy was committing even more unspeakable acts against an American.

I don't think "changing the subject" by itself would be a strong enough motive. But to the extent that changing the subject and covering up a crime are not mutually exclusive (indeed would reinforce each other), I wouldn't put it past the CIA and/or other intelligence operatives to activate such a diabolical scenario. (The CIA has come up with crazier, more nefarious schemes before.)

Like millions of others, I let myself in for the misfortune of downloading the video. It was so barbaric I failed to notice many of the discrepancies the conspiracy theorists, and some professional observers with real expertise, have been pointing out. Two, however, struck me at the time: 1) The beheading itself, so shameful to watch, looked somehow unreal (no rivers of blood, etc.). 2) The time sequence, as noted on the video recording, was discontinuous. Later, after reading various profiles of Nick Berg, I was also struck that the gaunt hostage with the Lincolnesque beard in the video looked not at all like the round-faced, beardless Nick Berg I saw in earlier photos of him.

But now that they've been pointed out to me, I don't put much credence in the conpiracy claims for these discrepancies: the terrorists looked too well-fed to be rough-and-ready terrorists on the run; their hands looked too lily white; one of them is wearing American running shoes (supposedly a no-no) and another is wearing a gold ring (devout Moslems wouldn't do that); you can't see the prosthetic leg which the chief terrorist, Musab Al-Zarqawi, reportedly wears; Zarqawi was reported dead in 2003; Berg's blood-curdling scream was "probably" a woman's voice dubbed onto the video's out-of-sync soundtrack; the entire soundtrack was dubbed (so what?); the orange prison outfit Nick Berg was wearing and the white plastic patio chair he was sitting in for part of the video match up with the outfit and chairs seen in the Abu Ghraib torture photos (this does give pause).

The notion being touted by some that Berg was actually dead before he was beheaded is not inconceivable. (Thus the lack of blood.) But that doesn't mean the CIA killed him and faked the video. The terrorists could have done that themselves. The notion that the hostage in the video was not Berg seems hard to believe. You would think his family or his friends would have noticed and said so. The notion that Berg might still be alive somewhere in captivity is also not credible. Trouble is, I don't know what to believe.

Postscript: How does this fit into the conspiracy theories? A Johnny-on-the-Spot associate of Michael Moore interviewed Nick Berg for "Fahrenheit 9/11," but the footage never made it into the film.