claims. For one thing, if you put all the defendants in a room together, they'd immediately kill each other.

This group of arch-secular nationalists has supposedly been in bed with the Maoist PKK, the extreme-left Revolutionary People's Liberation Party, the Islamist Hizbullah and Milli Gorus, the ultranationalist Turkish Revenge Brigades, the Turkish Workers' and Peasants' Liberation Army, the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party, and the Islamic Great East Raiders Front. That makes for one highly promiscuous conspiracy.

It's true that historically, these ideological borders have proved easier to cross in practice than you might think (just change 'international' to 'national'), but these detainees are not merely enemies on paper - they're actual enemies. During the 1990s, for example, two of the men now charged with founding Ergenekon ran death squads that killed suspected PKK sympathizers.

If you put all the defendants in a room together, they’d kill each other

The elderly communist editor of a left-wing newspaper has been detained even though prosecutors claim that Ergenekon was behind the bombing of that very same newspaper. It is hard to imagine just how this fractious rabble could have organised a coup that clearly would have required tight operational security and a degree of mutual trust not usually found among murderers and the intimates of their victims.

The timing of the arrests has been suspicious, too, even to those who are not by nature conspiracy-minded. The first wave of arrests took place just weeks before parliamentary elections for the presidency, deflecting attention from the AKP's controversial decision to put one of its top men in the post.

In March, Turkey's chief prosecutor filed a lawsuit demanding the closure of the AKP. (Yes, that's the same prosecutor, and no, no one knows whose side they're really on.) Another wave of arrests followed within hours. The next wave followed the prosecutor's opening arguments. When a corruption scandal involving the senior ranks of the AKP hit the papers, police immediately rounded up yet another group of plotters. (This time, having run out of plausible candidates for detention, they arrested a well-known transsexual concert organizer.)

National stereotypes tend not to come from nowhere. If the Italians have a special feeling for wedding cakes and the English for rose gardens, Turks really do have a knack for conspiracies. The Ergenekon trial displays this talent in its most advanced form - though it does no party to the story much credit otherwise.