Top 10 Conspiracy Theories Of The Noughties

It's the end of the world as we know it, or maybe not. As the world's most powerful men ended the decade with a load of hot air in Copenhagen, the rest of us were left wondering just how hot our air is going to get. Having spent most of the noughties being told that the debate is over, conspiracy theorists are becoming increasingly vocal in their opposition to the global warming lobby. With scientists, politicians, and a House of Lords inquiry providing detailed rebuttals of the science behind man-made climate change, the cracks in the case for creating a "green planet" to save ourselves from melting ice caps and burning summers are beginning to appear. A multi-billion dollar industry built on fear and government misinformation provides the ideal backdrop for one of the biggest alleged conspiracies of the noughties.

A tactical nightmare, a military bungle, thousands of allied troops dead and no exit strategy considered, Iraq will go down as the biggest foreign policy blunder of the noughties, and leaves a Vietnam-sized psychological wound for a new generation. It will also go down as the most conspiracy theory laden conflict ever. From the dodgy dossier used by Tony Blair to sell the war to the British parliament, to the US determination to plunder the oil and natural resources of the gulf state with scant regard to nation building, the conspiracies that surround the invasion will go down in the history books as the cause of George W Bush's plummeting popularity and the precursor to the premature end of Blair's term as Prime Minister. The torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the extraordinary rendition of "terror suspects" and their subsequent "waterboarding" in Guantanamo Bay and reports of the slaughter of innocent people in Fallujah lent an altogether more sinister element to a war that destroyed America's credibility on the world stage. The conspiracy theorists who believe the invasion was launched solely for oil, rather than regime change and human rights, are becoming the vocal majority rather than a silent minority.

Pop's flawed king met a sad end in June 2009 as his drug-riddled body was removed from the secluded LA mansion where his final days were played out. Quite what happened in his last hours remains a mystery, with conspiracy theories about his death, murder, suicide, or alien abduction as bizarre as they are numerous. The LAPD still have an investigation to complete, manslaughter charges against his medical team have been mooted, and those adoring members of MJ's public who still haven't lost faith in their fallen idol don't have closure. Perhaps the strangest conspiracy theory of all is that this was all an elaborate hoax to avoid his crushing debts and tough touring schedule, and that somewhere out in the wild west of America, Jacko is sharing stories with Elvis as they ride around the plains on Shergar.

What began as a group of Ivy League geeks sharing pictures on a university web link has become a multi-media revolution worth billions of dollars. Boasting the personal details of hundreds of millions of members across the globe, the website is not just a convenient way for friends to keep in touch with loved ones, it is a powerful tool for anyone able to access the private data it contains. The conspiracy theory goes that government hackers in the US have cracked Facebook and can use it at their will to spy on the public and control the fate of the population. Facebook has been the spark for everything from murders to marriages, and has become an obsession for millions who live their lives behind the ultimately fragile security of the internet. Could the government really be using what began as a grass roots public movement for its own ends? It certainly wouldn't be the first time.

The face of Tony Blair's downfall, and one of the most remarkable deaths of the noughties for the impact it had on the British public's perception of what the government was capable of. Conspiracy theorists in the US have long feared the ruthless nature of their country's shadowy spy network, the death of Dr Kelly showed British conspiracists that they too had legitimate cause for concern. The official line, that the weapons expert committed suicide after being outed by the government in 2004 for leaking information to journalists on the "dodgy dossier" that helped justify the Iraq war to parliament on the basis that Saddam Hussein had the capability to launch weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes, was so palpably untrue that toxicologists, paramedics and respected scientists have all offered detailed accounts that show it simply could not have happened. All the signs point to Dr Kelly having been killed off in a secret service "wet disposal", most likely orchestrated by the British government to prevent him revealing further embarrassing secrets. Moments before his death on the isolated Harrowdown Hill in rural Oxfordshire he emailed a friend to warn of "many dark actors playing games". How tragically prophetic his email proved to be.

A theory which has gained considerable traction in the Muslim world following one of the worst natural disasters in South Asian history is that the tsunami could have been caused by an Indian nuclear experiment aided by Israeli and American experts. Theorists suggest that the heated nuclear race between India and unstable neighbour Pakistan, led to the former spending billions on sophisticated nuclear technology from the US. Theorists are then split as to whether the test went awry, or whether backed by the US and Israel, India was taking the first step in "geological warfare" as part of a bid to wipe out Muslims in the heavily Islamic areas of Indonesia and Sri Lanka which suffered most of the 230,000 deaths caused by the Tsunami.

He is the most recognisable terrorist on the planet, an aging, slight cleric with a serious kidney disorder. Yet we are led to believe that the Al Qaeda chief has successfully managed to avoid the most sophisticated army and intelligence service in the history of the world for more than eight years. With the notorious Saudi serial killer still at large, and the US maintaining that it has no new information on his whereabouts, he remains a convenient focal point for the "war on terror" and the occupation of Afghanistan. Tapes taken after the December 2001 siege of his compound in the caves of Tora Bora show a very different Osama Bin Laden to the man who appeared before the September 11 attacks he is supposed to have masterminded. Surely the US haven't created a bogeyman character to keep their public in a constant state of fear and justify war across the globe, have they?

In many ways Dan Brown's 2003 archeological code-cracking romp was the defining novel of the noughties. For the conspiracy community it was a dream come true. The Priory of Sion, a secret sect established to protect the secret identity of Jesus Christ's descendants in the French Merovingian royal family, became the focus of every theorist who ever dreamed of tracking down the elusive Holy Grail. The book single-handedly restored into popular culture the ancient myth that Jesus fathered an heir with Mary Magdalene. It also created a theory of its own about the powerful, and very real, ultra-strict Opus Dei chapter of the Roman Catholic Church, a group who are distinctly unhappy about the international spotlight that has been thrown on their activities.

History is unlikely to be kind to America's 43rd President. Two bloody and unpopular foreign wars, a bungled response to a huge natural disaster that left thousands of Black American's homeless, an economic meltdown that threatened the economic dominance of the world's only superpower and a collection of embarrassing speeches that left respect for the US at an all-time low are just some of his shortcomings. But for conspiracy theorists, the greatest scandal of the Bush presidency was his election to office in 2000 and 2004. As the new millennium dawned we were treated to an unseemly scramble in Florida as hanging chads, spoilt papers and the intervention of a certain Presidential candidates brother, Governor Jeb Bush, created an election mired in uncertainty and allegations of corruption. In 2004 John Kerry's massive lead in the opinion polls was overturned in such astonishing fashion that Bush again found himself accused of nefarious tactics, including the use of controversial "caging lists" and the false registration of hundreds of thousands of voters in the key swing state of Ohio. If the theory is true, how different the noughties could have been.