"There was a pay-to-play conspiracy, an ecosystem of corruption that started at the very top," Mr. Marshall said.
The transcript of the hearing, however, indicated that lawyers for the organizers of the tournament in Hamburg, Germany, a clay-court event which is to be downgraded from the top tier of tournaments for 2009, contend that the Germans were victims of a pay-for-play conspiracy.
Dutt, to his credit, didn't seek to play the conspiracy card.
It was expected that when the "all powerful" myth didn't play out, conspiracy theories would wild.
Duchovny, who first achieved fame playing the conspiracy theorist Mulder in The X-Files, has for years claimed to suffer from sex addiction.
In "Contagion," Steven Soderbergh's film about a virus that decimates the planet, Jude Law plays a conspiracy-minded freelance video blogger who regards vaccines as scams churned out by a medical establishment interested only in profits.
"He's trying to decode what part these people play in the conspiracy, if there is one.
The typical Syrian humour, plucky in the face of absurdity, was quick to make fun of the visit to Hama and also to play upon the conspiracy theories of the Syrian regime.
Statements like that, analysts say, play into Islamist conspiracy theories, which blame the United States and Jews for the Muslim world's oppressive rulers, stagnant economies and sense of powerlessness.
There were other factors at play, including the conspiracy theory that Lyndon Johnson and Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley helped fix a close election for Kennedy, but the debate retains its mythic status because it was the first time politics could double as mass entertainment.
In the case of the failed coup, there is much more at play than fanciful conspiracy theories, many Turks say, because of the nearly universal conviction that it was engineered by Mr. Gulen, who for 16 years has lived in a secluded compound in the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania.
