Snakes creeping out Bangkok - Asia-pacific - Al Jazeera English

Snakes creeping out Bangkok - Asia-pacific - Al Jazeera English

The Battle Of Trenton, Or No Holiday for Hessians

This Sunday, December 26, 210 Marks the Anniversary of the battle of Trenton. If this Revolutionary War battle name does not jog one’s memory, ask yourself why Washington crossed the Delaware in the first place. Those now famous Hessians he fought were encamped in winter barracks in Trenton, New Jersey.

Washington achieved tactical and strategic surprise that day, routing the Hessians and raising the moral of his troops. It was a near run thing. Washington was delayed by foul weather. It was deep winter and New Jersey after all. Washington wanted to strike at midnight but the weather delayed the attack to dawn and caused some artillery units to be left behind.

Still the dawn attack was a very unpleasant surprise to the Hessians. The Hessian commander had some intelligence that Washington was up to something and was screaming for more troops and a change of venue, but he had no idea where or when Washington might strike. Thus when he was given his early wake up call, the Hessian commander was out of sorts.

The Hessian troops were not too happy either. They were sober, but the lack of a dawn post had left them bleary eyed, and lethargic. They attempted resistance, but tactical surprise and bad moral in the Hessian troops wrong-footed the mercenaries. The Hessian resistance quickly collapsed.

As battles go Trenton was minor both tactically and strategically. The real impact was psychological. After being pushed out of both New York and New Jersey moral was low in the Colonial Armies. Trenton was a much needed shot in the arm. Spirits rose after Trenton as did much needed recruitment and reenlistment efforts.

As for the British, they were shocked and dismayed by the news from the Garden State. Pacifying New Jersey was turning out to be a much taller order than suspected. Who knew such a small state could cause so much trouble? The Militia of New Jersey was especially irksome to the British, bloodying the noses of the Red Coats in several engagements.

The winter of 1776-1777 was none too jolly for British. The forces of King George III were getting the first taste of what was to be a long attritional struggle with an opponent that was often down, but never out.

So happy Delaware River crossing day. Hopefully December 26 will mean more to you than the first day you can return some of those awful gifts your clueless friends and relatives gave you.  “ A fruit cake; you shouldn’t have. No. Seriously. You really shouldn’t have. I’m allergic to the nuts.

They Killed Kennedy.

It is late November and that means one of the more enduring cottage industries of the United States is  producing at full capacity. That would be the producers of books and articles proving that JFK was done in by a conspiracy. It is entirely appropriate that these notions come out at the same time with the turkeys.

If you are sensing a little irritation here, you are correct. Nothing sets your faithful reporters’ teeth on edge quicker than these tales of an all singing, all dancing,conspiracy with out end, and the “proofs” offered for their existence. Time to pour the ice cold water of reason on these matters.

Uffelman's Razor:
[Given Murphy's law, ...] One should not attribute to evil design any unfortunate result which can be attributed to error. A mistake (or series of mistakes) is the simpler and more likely explanation.
Conspiracy Corollary to Uffelman's Razor:
Nothing should be attributed to conspiracy that can be explained by error or a succession of errors.

Granted the “explanation” that JFK died because of an epic cock-up by National, State and Local security agencies is very cold comfort. It has the small saving grace of being true.

Let us lay the ground work gentle reader. Let us deal with the facts on the ground before JFK got shot.
Federal agencies were rusty and sub par.  The last successful assassination of a President was beyond the living memory of most citizens of the United States in 1963. William McKinley in 1901 was the previous president to fall to an assassin’s gun.  More to the point, an assassination via a lone gunman was more of a mental exercise for the Secret Service than a point of concern. The last attempt on the life of any President was against Harry Truman by a group of radical Puerto Rican Nationalists. Not to beat this particular drum too hard but, the organization memory of the Secret Service had large holes in it. There was far too much slop and slack in the organization by 1963.

If the Feds were not running their “A” game that day, what of the state of Texas? Specifically what about law enforcement in the city of Dallas? Dallas in the 60’s was still a raw, violent and corrupt cow town. Incompetence and corruption ran rife though the Dallas Police. The Dallas Department of Public Safety was barely up to the task of controlling the mean and violent streets of Dallas. Tasked with Protecting the life of JFK they failed miserable.  

If you follow any kind of history, the history of nations, the history of peoples, the history of government, the history of organizations, you will see that they all have high and low points. Often you will see a nadir, or a low point in the history.  At these low points, incompetence and idiocy rule the roost. Common sense precautions and proceedings fall by the wayside. Sloth and slovenly behavior are the order of the day. Things fall apart. Things do not get done. Common sense proscriptions and preventative measures get ignored because no one wants to put in the effort to do them.

The security apparatus tasked with protecting JFK was thing of patches and shreds. There were gaping institutional holes in the system. It would take the assassination of JFK, RFK, and George Wallace for the Secret Service to spool up to the present policies and procedures. Even after significantly beefing up security for the president, the Secret Service still nearly lost Ronald Reagan in the 1980’s. Only John Hinckley’s poor mental state and even worse aim saved the Gipper’s life.

The mind reels that the death of a man like JFK could be cut down so randomly, and so easily, by a marginal schlub. It rebels at the notion that a cypher, a complete nonentity like Lee Harvey Oswald, could cut down the most powerful man in the world. But it happened in just such a manner. All it took was Oswald’s desire to make something of himself, a literal window of opportunity and easy access to small arms.

Incompetence and sloppy planing delivered a clear shot to Oswald. His Marine Corps training provided a competence in rifle fire. The U.S. Mail provided the actual weapon. It was that simple
Even today, with all the tragedy that has occurred via easy access to fire arms, those weapons are still ridiculously easy to acquire. One could waltz into most gun shows with a huge thin foil hat on one’s head and a sock puppet on the hand, and still walk out with Semi-Automatic rifle. Just bring cash.
Unfortunately none of these arguments will hold much water with the CT true believers. They will continue to spin their confections, and people will continue to purchase those intellectual empty calories. The route through Daily Plaza was a set up? And how was that achieved? Do any of the proponents of that notion understand how many people would have to be in on the conspiracy to make that work? Far too many for success.

Real conspiracies are small and focused. Think Cheney’s WHIG and the staffing of that effort. It was Dead-Eye Dick and a handful of others, Conspiracies are always small because each new member brought into the conspiracy multiplies the risk of exposure.

One more thing about conspiracies, at least conspiracies in governance, they are short-lived. Because they are focused on a discernible goal, they end within a short period of time. They end because their goal has been reached; or because of some internal failure. Either way their secrecy ends in discreet amount of time. Secret conspiracies that stretch over decades of time are the product of over-active imaginations. They are as thick on the ground as unicorns. Conspiracies that hire a cast of thousands, which is about every JFK CT out there, are equally mythical.

It is almost certain that this newest JFK CT theory to hit the silver screen will play well. Oliver Stone and Kevin Costner did well with their movie based on the facts-free efforts of  epically corrupt Jim Garrison in New Orleans. Don’t get your faithful corespondent started on what a soup sandwich that prosecution was.

Despite the gross receipts DiCaprio and company pull in, no one should confuse their success at the box office with any kind of final truth telling about JFK.   As pointed out by Gerald Posner in Case Closed, the final answer is still that Oswald was the shooter, and that he acted alone. If Posner is too flawed a vessel for you, Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy by Vincent Bugliosi covers the same ground and reaches the same conclusion. Nothing offered by Hartmann and his collaborator is going to change that conclusion.

It is beyond reason to believe that a Justice Department run by RFK would not follow the possibility that JFK was done in by the mob. If there was a single shred of actionable evidence that supported that possibility, RFK, one of the most ruthless of Federal Prosecutors ever to be US AG, would not go after the mobster(s) that killed his brother? In what parallel universe did this happen? No, even if the AG was not kith and kin, the Feds would rip the Mobster(s) to shreds if they had evidence to link them with the murder of the president. This is the simple institutional facts on the ground. The Federal Government cannot let gagsters shoot up its chief executive officer on a whim. The Federal Government cannot tolerate such goings on for any reason whatsoever. The Feds would find a way to put an epic hurt on the Mafiosi by legal or extra-legal means. As they say in the Godfather, it would not be personal; it would just be business.

As goes that conspiracy theory, so go the rest. Pull back from the vortex of the illogic hole, and every Kennedy CT falls apart. They fall apart because they fail Occam's razor. They drag one into a bizarre parallel universe where needless complexity runs rampant.

Even the explanation offered for “them,” “they,” killing JFK becomes needlessly Byzantine. When your CT can’t offer a believable motive, you’re in deep trouble. Gentle reader, your faithful correspondent has yet to read or hear an “explanation” from JFK C.T. enthusiasts that makes any sense. The risk to benefit ratio Is totally out of whack. Its rational only exists in the minds of the CT faithful, not in the cold light of reason.

The Conspiracy to assassinate JFK is not now, nor ever been a part of History, even alternate history. It is not science. It is not art. It is religion. It is a confession of faith. It is  in the same league as belief in the Trinity or the Virgin Birth. This belief is a thing of shadow and mist. It is a combination of myth and wishful thinking. In a very real way it corrupts and degenerates the very tragedy of JFK’s death.
That tragedy is that a systemic failure of governance, and a culture that fetishizes guns, allowed the most marginal of its citizens to cut down JFK like a rabid yellow dog. The other tragedy is we would rather grasp on to fantastical stories of grand conspiracies than to deal with that awful truth.
 

The “Machine” Gets Beta Tested

he problem, if there is a real problem, with listening to Dan Carlin is that he gets very dark and dangerous parts of the brain firing off. In Episode 182 of his Common Sense podcast he went off on his frequent hobby horses: our interventionist foreign policy.  Not to dumb down such a passionate and flexible mind, and his arguments, but I am about to do that exact thing. He tore into what he saw as TR’s contribution to the corruption of the  Constitutional office of the President. He saw TR as radical usurper of Congressional prerogatives and man guilty of setting up the American Empire.

A miss is as good as a mile, and Dan, as he is wont to do, tosses his darts at the wrong target. If TR was an awful President, one of the worst in Mr. Carlin’s estimation, what about the President who really set up the hated machine of what is now called “The Forever War,” William McKinley? Why no love, or rather hate, for the man who gave us the Spanish American war?

Not having the pile of books that Dan can dive into, I will attempt to support my argument via the rickety structure that is the series of tubes known as the Internet; and my own incredibly biased opinion.

Instead of focusing on the proximate cause of the war, Cuba, I will sail much further east. If you are looking for remembering the Maine, or T.R.’s Rough Riders (whose Amateur flailing about, and bacon, was saved by the black professionals of 9th Cavalry) look somewhere else.  I am not going to Cuba, I am going to the Philippines.

It is in the Philippines that we see how propaganda can live on much longer than the actual need for it. In the U.S., the not so jolly, not so little war fought in the Philippine Archipelago is still called an “insurrection.” In the PI, they are much more clear about these things, they call it by its proper name “The Philippine-American War.” It was a brutal and nasty conflict that killed a large amount of the Pinoy Nation. No one knows for sure, but some say up to a million Filipinos lost their lives. The U.S. was not exactly counting.  They were doing unto the Pinoys what they did to the Apache, the Nez Perce, the Comanches, the Lakota, and other First Peoples of the United States. One reads of the later “battles” of the conflict in the Philippines, and it reads exactly like what happened at Wounded Knee. There were lots of dead natives, and barely a scratch on the U.S. combat effectives.

If anything is remembered of the conflict, it is the Battle of Manila Bay. It was there that the famous words, “You may fire when ready, Gridley,” were uttered. No one bothers to ask what Gridley and his Admiral were doing floating in a bay half the world away from the supposed casus belli. What they were doing was pure and unadulterated back-stabbing imperialism.

The back-stabbing was perpetrated on one of the tragic heroes of the Philippines, Emilio Aguinaldo y Famy. He had fought a bitter independence struggle with Spain. The hostilities ended rather oddly with Aguinaldo in exile, and with Spain paying Aguinaldo’s partisans $800,000 Mexican to just go away to Hong Kong. But when the U.S. came to “liberate” the Philippines, Aguinaldo took up arms again.

The U.S. made very short work of the Spanish colonial forces. Not only had rot affected the combat effectiveness of Spain’s Philippines garrison, but they had been fighting a long demoralizing guerrilla struggle since 1896. By 1898, Spain colonial presence was a thoroughly rotten door that only needed a swift kick to splinter. The U.S. was only too happy to provide the kick.

It did not take too long for the goals of the U.S. government and the goals of Aguinaldo’s Ilustrados to come into conflict. While they both wanted a top-down style government, there was a huge argument on who was to be on top. Aguinaldo would come to grief because a group of Filipinos known as the Macabebe preferred the foreign Americans as their boss to the domestic Ilustrados.

With the Macabebes providing the actual double-cross via Funston’s raiders, Aguinaldo was out of action on March 23, 1901. The resistance to the U.S. occupation slowly fell apart. By April 13, 1902, all formal resistance by the Filipinos had ended with the surrender of Miguel Malvar and his devastated collection of three thousand men.

Informal resistance sputtered on for quite longer especially in the Muslim South; from 1902 until 1913. This was the “Moro Rebellion.” U.S. forces continued the winning strategy of concentration camps and total war that had given them victory in the North. But Mindanao is not Luzon. Moro tribesmen wielding spears and swords offered a fanatical resistance to U.S. occupation. It was an opposition informed by the prerequisites of jihad. The U.S. forces did not cover themselves in glory. In places like the First Battle of Bud Dajo, U.S. forces covered themselves knee deep in gore. Of the 800 to 1000 Moros who took refuge at Bud Dajo, a fortified volcanic crater, a whopping 6 lived to tell the tale.

In this first beta test of American Imperialism, we not only see the pattern that would become routine in later years; we also see how the opposition to “Manifest Destiny” operated.

The opposition to the 1898 war with Spain was vigorous.  Many leading lights of late Victorian America were solidly against the Spanish-American War. Men like Mark Twain inveighed against what they saw as a betrayal of the U.S.’s anti-colonial roots. If Glenn Greenwald has a spiritual and political father, it may very well be Mark Twain. If you doubt that, read Twain’s “War Prayer” ( http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/making/warprayer.html )

If Twain set a pattern, then what of yellow journalist William Randolph Hearst? What of the man who was one of the midwives to the “Jolly Little War”? What of the expansionists who urged the U.S. to “Take up the White Man’s Burden?”

Almost every military adventure the U.S. has participated in began first as an act of high moral dudgeon. This bears an uncanny resemblance to the  wars of the Roman Empire. Only once in Roman History, and then only after the fact, did the Romans admit their motives may have been less than pure. That was the Third and Last Punic War. Of course the fact that the casus belli was morally suspect did not prevent the Romans from burning Carthage to the ground, and taking the survivors into slavery. Other than the raising of Carthage, every war fought was pure as virgin snow, and if you objected to that talking point, the Romans would gut you.

It is in those Roman echos that we hear the defense of our current U.S. empire, an empire that began in the Philippines. It is in the PI that one can see the persistence of empire and the longevity of colonialism. In many ways, the PI is still trying to work out its daddy issues with its Tito Sam. Washington has big-footed the political processes of the PI ever since that fateful day of April 13, 1902, when the last vestiges of truly independent Philippine government was snuffed out on.

The conflicted emotions on the U.S. side cropped up early and often. Just a few years after invading the PI, (to offer the benighted people there the benefits of civilization) the U.S. passed the Tydings–McDuffie Act of 1934. In this act, the U.S. set up a Commonwealth of the Philippines with the aim of granting the Island full independence in ten years. The small price that the Filipinos had to pay for liberation was that they would no longer be allowed to come into the U.S.  A quota of 50 Filipinos a year would be magnanimously allowed to come to the promised land. Thus, once being “Christianized” and “ civilized”, the Filipinos would not be allowed to work in civilized and Christianize America. There was a “here’s your hat, what’s the hurry” aspect to both the Filipino people and the Pinoy nation that Uncle Sugar affected.

World War Two torpedoed those plans. Nothing makes an Imperial Nation value a territory more than when another Imperial Power tries to grab that piece of land. The blood and treasure spent on recovering the PI to the breast of Lady Liberty warped both Washington and Manila in ways that were never healthy. The horrors of the Japanese occupation and the Liberation by the U.S. put the Pinoy Nation deeply in Tito Sam’s debt. The Philippines may be 80% Roman Catholic, but for a certain generation, their true god is Douglas MacArthur. The Holy Trinity is no mach for the general with the corn-cob pipe. Washington overvalued the PI as a strategic asset, and the PI spiraled down into dependence and Kelptocracy

The deference that Filipinos showed their Ninong in D.C. became sycophantic, it became clinging and unbalanced. This most devout of Roman Catholic nations, became, in slow degrees, the U.S. military’s brothel and adult Disneyland. Two huge military bases were built on Philippine soil, and the PI became a minor pawn in the global machinations of the Cold War. It was almost inevitable that the social distortions would finally create the military dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos.

Marcos and his happy bunch of thieves were allowed to run riot through the archipelago. Whatever was not securely nailed down was whisked away into hidden Swiss bank accounts. The Administrations in Washington turned a blind eye toward the rampant corruption because in the words of FDR (said about a South American dictator), Marcos may have been a son of a bitch, but he was our son of a bitch.

Thus, the U.S. was willing to have the PI slide into a fairly typical third world dictatorship so it could keep its military toys stationed in the tropics. The U.S. did OK, the PI did not. The years of Martial Law by Marcos corrupted the politics and the culture of the PI in ways that are still being felt. Thanks to our assist, the PI is a desperately poor, dysfunctional, and hierarchical nation that is spinning out of control. Even in “Imperial Manila” the infrastructure is a cruel joke. A heavy rain can cause massive flooding. A week of heavy rain caused epic flooding that brought the northern island of Luzon to its knees in 2009. In the outlying provinces the infrastructure exists only on paper. The actual money spent to “complete” the roads, bridges, electrification, etc. was stolen outright by corrupt government officials.

The only things that got Washington out of the PI were the end of the Cold War and Mount Pinatubo.  Washington began to wonder if keeping the bases was such a great idea after the Soviet Union evaporated. Washington was even less enamored when those same bases got covered in millions of tons of volcanic ash. Clark Air Base was a total loss. What Pinatubo did not ruin, the looters stole. With only Subic Naval Base on the table, negotiations between Washington and Manila went flying off the rails and straight into a ditch. The UP educated section of the Filipino elites were angrily talking about the need to “kill the father;” and the government of the PI was making noises of its own. With such nationalist notions swimming about in the public consciousness of the PI, Uncle Sam decided to dash out the nearest exit with all his toys.

But it was all too soon before both the U.S. and the PI had their Brokeback Mountain moment of “ I wish I knew how to quit you.” Uncle Sugar was back in PI to assist the nation in the “War on Terror.” It was not long before the old status quo was reestablished. Proof positive of this was illustrated by a very nasty rape “allegation” involving U.S. Marines and a young teen-aged Filipina. The “alleged” gang rape of the young woman magically disappeared after her family was granted some money and a get-out-of-poverty jail cards (U.S. green cards). Thus was an “alleged” gross violation of a young woman’s rights and dignity smoothed over.

Looking back over more than one hundred years of U.S. colonial misadventure in “The Peal of the Orient”, one can see the disconnect between U.S. avowed goals and grubby reality.  The U.S. went to the PI to “pick up the White Man’s burden” and to “civilize the degenerate brown races.” What really occurred was the feckless creation of a dysfunctional client state whose only real export is its own people. It is said that the PI spent four hundred years in a Spanish convent, and Fifty years in Hollywood. Unfortunately for the PI, the years in Hollywood have been spent making an Irwin Allen disaster flick.

The long and tangled history of the United States in the Philippines is illustrative of how the US interventionist foreign policy really works. Interference by Washington in the Affairs of the Pinoy Nation have made an epic mess. The PI is less of a nation and more of a therapy session between Imperial Manila and its neglected and needy citizens. The recriminations, backbiting, co-dependency and dysfunction of the relationship is depressing to watch. The only thing that is worse is watching the relationship between the paternalistic and negligent United States and the always-desperate-and-chronically-needy PI. Washington only seems to care about the archipelago when it fits into some broader foreign policy concern. The PI is a useful pawn to push around the Asian chess board. Of course, the best and brightest of Foggy Bottom never consult Manila on whether it wants to participate in the game. The interest, needs, or desires of the Pinoy Nation are either made subservient to the needs of U.S., or totally ignored.  It has been this way for a long time, ever since 1898.

It was in that fateful year that the experiment in American Empire began in earnest. The P.I. was the beta test of U.S. hegemony. It is in that island chain’s history that we can see how that hegemony really works, or more exactly fails to work. For the most part, it is hard to see what, if any, benefit the vast majority of Pinoys have accrued from the long association. A small, connected elite have gotten fabulously wealthy but the poor have only grown more numerous and more desperate. Adding the pluses and minuses it appears a wash at best.

If after more than 100 years in the PI, the best the U.S. interventionists efforts can manage is a shrug of the soldiers; then what of the rest of the developing world?  That is a question best not answered if one believes in U.S. exceptionalism. The answer is not pretty, gentle reader; it is not pretty at all.

Papers reveal Nixon plan for North Korea nuclear strike | World news | The Guardian

Papers reveal Nixon plan for North Korea nuclear strike | World news | The Guardian: "It is more than 35 years since he was shunted out of office, but the thought of Richard Nixon's finger on the nuclear trigger still has the power to terrify.

Now it has been revealed that the highly erratic president's metaphorical digit was hovering even closer than was widely realised as his administration laid plans for an atomic strike against North Korea in 1969 following the shooting down of a US spy plane.

According to newly revealed government documents, Nixon is even believed to have ordered nuclear bombers to be put on standby for an immediate strike after North Korean jets downed the American plane as it flew over international waters collecting electronic and radio intelligence.

The documents, obtained by the National Security Archive in Washington after a freedom of information request, describe the plan codenamed Freedom Drop, which called for 'pre-co-ordinated options for the selective use of tactical nuclear weapons against North Korea'."

They’re really this hardcore

http://pandagon.net/index.php/site/theyre_really_this_hardcore/#When:20:15:00Z


The super hard core right wing takeover of the Texas State School Board has been completed. Under the guise of eradicating liberal bias, the school board created a set of standards that require schools to teach factually incorrect right wing propaganda in lieu of history. And it’s bad:

Several changes include sidelining Thomas Jefferson, who favoured separation of church and state, while introducing a new focus on the “significant contributions” of pro-slavery Confederate leaders during the civil war.
The new curriculum asserts that “the right to keep and bear arms” is an important element of a democratic society. Study of Sir Isaac Newton is dropped in favour of examining scientific advances through military technology.
There is also a suggestion that the anti-communist witch-hunt by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s may have been justified.

Some of that is to be expected---their anti-modernist, pro-paranoid worldview isn’t a surprise anymore.  But even I was surprised to see that someone appears to have a vendetta against the theory of gravity, and that the school board has decided to indulge it.  Pro-science liberals are often joking that the attacks on the theory of evolution are the equivalent of attacking the theory of gravity, but that’s because we foolishly thought they’d never go that far.  But I guess we’re wrong---if it’s going to piss a liberal off, I suppose at least some wingnuts are going to deny the theory of gravity.  Perhaps believing in gravity is the top of a slippery slope towards believing in evolution?  Or maybe they just want to discourage kids from believing that science itself exists outside of the realm of weapons development?  Who fucking knows?
But it gets worse!  They’ve set new records in denialism of American slavery.

The education board has dropped references to the slave trade in favour of calling it the more innocuous “Atlantic triangular trade”, and recasts the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as driven by Islamic fundamentalism.

I will say that this gets to the heart of the mode of thought that’s best described as “slavery denialism"---anything from denying that the Civil War was fought because of slavery to minimizing the horror of slavery.  I think the initial assumption about slavery denialists is that they’re in denial because they don’t want to admit that America has such an ugly history, and so they minimize it.  But what I’ve learned about denialists is that it’s usually something a bit different---they want to sow confusion about an issue mostly because they either aren’t down on horrible thing X or they actually kind of dig the idea of of horrible thing X or they share attitudes with the perpetrators of horrible thing X.  Minimizing is part of this, because it’s about implying that people with attitudes like theirs aren’t so bad, but part of it is always perpetrating the attitudes that caused horrible thing X.
You definitely see that going on with this euphemism for the slave trade.  “Atlantic triangular trade” reduces the human beings that were forced into slavery to commodities like tobacco or sugar.  To use this euphemism is to implicitly agree with slave owners that enslaved people don’t count as human beings.  What seems on the surface to be minimizing is, if you look a little deeper, actually agreeing with the ideology underpinning slavery and making excuses for it.

Mosquito Did In King Tut

King Tutankhamen, Egypt's best-known pharaoh, was a frail youth who died due to "severe malaria" more than 3,000 years ago, researchers have said, following extensive DNA analysis on his remains.
Scientists from Egypt, Germany and elsewhere, have been conducting DNA tests and CT scans on King Tut's mummy for the past two years, uncovering new details of the young ruler's lineage.
In a study to be published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on Wednesday, the scientists say the boy king was born with a cleft palate and clubfoot, and his parents were most likely brother and sister.
"This is how King Tut died, from severe malaria," Zahi Hawass, Egypt's senior archaeologist and co-author of the new study, said on Tuesday.
"We actually can say for the first time that we revealed the mystery behind the family of the Golden Boy - King Tut.

"He had severe necrosis and deformities in the toe of his left foot, and it caused him severe pain. This is why he was limping, he couldn't walk normally.

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