E-Mail This Article to a Friend MEDIA Anatomy of a conspiracy theory BY DAN KENNEDY

The capture of Saddam Hussein has played out in the US media with all the swagger of a John Wayne movie, right down to the American soldier who allegedly sneered at the Butcher of Baghdad, "President Bush sends his regards."

Internationally, though, there have been questions right from the start. Did the US really capture Saddam on its own? Did it have help? Or — and this is the truly intriguing question — was Saddam already being held prisoner at the time the US grabbed him?

The first media outlet to raise these questions may have been Debka.com, an Israeli site much read among cloak-and-dagger types. On December 14 — the very day that US officials announced the capture — Debka reported that Saddam’s bedraggled appearance, the two unidentified men grabbed at the scene, and the likelihood that Saddam couldn’t have escaped his spider hole unassisted all "point to one conclusion: Saddam Hussein was not in hiding; he was a prisoner."

The story got a huge boost over the weekend when the Sunday Express, a London tabloid, weighed in with a rather wild story that the capture "may have been prompted by a blood feud which erupted after a tribal chief’s daughter was raped by the tyrant’s psychopathic eldest son Uday."

The article continued, "Saddam had already been handed over to Kurdish forces who then brokered a deal with US commanders. He was drugged and abandoned, ready for the American troops to recover him."

Other media outlets tell a tangled, confusing tale of Kurdish officials announcing the arrest, then belatedly denying they had anything to do with the operation. On Sunday, Al-Jazeera television carried a denial from Jalal Talabani, a member of the Iraqi Governing Council and the leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, denying that his forces had anything to do with Saddam’s capture and asserting that "the arrest of Saddam had been carried out by the Americans alone."

That would certainly comport with an account in Sunday’s New York Times, which reported that Saddam’s whereabouts were revealed within hours after the Americans captured his bodyguard.

A Web site called KurdishMedia.com — the "United Kurdish Voice" — is carrying a story by a Scottish newspaper, the Sunday Herald, which gives a great deal of credit to Qusrat Rasul Ali, "otherwise known as the lion of Kurdistan." According to the Herald, the lion — said to have "played a crucial role" in finding Saddam’s sons, Uday and Qusay — provided information to Talabani on Saddam’s whereabouts. "Armed with the information," the story continues, "Talabani made a beeline for US administration offices in Baghdad."

But the Herald draws no conclusions as to whether the Kurds actually captured Saddam and turned him over to the Americans — although it does inject a fascinating tidbit into the mix, reporting that one of the photos that the US distributed of Saddam’s hideout showed unripe yellow dates, suggesting it had been taken three months earlier.

No doubt it was inevitable that conspiracy theories would arise over Saddam’s arrest. And since it is utterly incredible that his theoretical Kurdish jailers would have entombed him with both a suitcase containing $750,000 and a loaded pistol, the notion that he was already being held depends on believing that US officials are flat-out lying about both of those particular details. Then again, the Bush administration’s record for truth-telling does not inspire confidence.

As the Phoenix went to press, the Kurdish angle had not broken into the American media, except for an Agence France-Presse (the French!) synopsis of the Express story. White House press secretary Scott McClellan was not asked a single question about it at Monday’s briefing, according to the WhiteHouse.gov transcript.

File this under: unlikely, but bears watching.