The U.S. Congress moved closer to sending more “defensive” arms to Ukraine with the passage of the latest National Defense Authorization Act passed last month.  James Carden provided more details at Consortium News:

Indeed, last month’s National Defense Authorization Act shows that – if nothing else – McCain and Graham are as good as their word: the recently passed defense appropriations bill provides for $500 million, including “defensive lethal assistance” to Kiev, as part of a $640 billion overall spending package.

The aid comes at a good time for the embattled Ukrainian President Poroshenko, whose approval rating hovers around 16 percent. In a bid to stave off the possibility of a far-right coup d’etat, Poroshenko is back to banging the war drums, promising, well, more blood.

In a little covered speech at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point on Sept. 19, Poroshenko promised that “American weapons will help us liberate the Donbas and return Ukrainian territories.” He also noted that Ukraine spends roughly 6 percent of its GDP on defense, “a figure,” he observed, “much bigger than the obligation for the NATO members.”

Clearly Washington’s condemnation of governments that wage war “against their own people” remains selective, contingent upon who is doing the killing and who is doing the dying. In this case, it would seem that Russian-speaking Ukrainians simply don’t rate.

Meanwhile, a new report by Sergiy Kudelia of Baylor University outlines the extrajudicial violence, including torture and murder, occurring on both sides with respect to the conflict in Donbass.   These brutal activities are often carried out by ultra-right and Neo-Nazi proxies (Azov Battalion and Right Sector) on the Kiev side:

For most of its twenty-five years of independence, Ukraine has been classified as a “partly free” state with a medium level of restrictions on civil liberties.[2] However, since 2014, its score on the “political terror scale” has increased from medium to high, indicating that “murders, disappearances, and torture are a common part of life.” While this deterioration can be partially attributed to widespread human rights abuses on rebel-held territories, the application of physical coercion has also become a standard element of Ukraine’s counterinsurgency tactics.

As an index created by V-Dem project shows, violence committed by government agents in Ukraine for the last three years has been at the highest level since the country’s independence (see Figure 1). Reports by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) remain the single most extensive source of information on physical integrity rights violations in Ukraine committed by government agents and their affiliates. The first evidence of enforced disappearances in Donbas by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) was reported in August 2014 with new episodes cited in every report since then. By August 2016, OHCHR concluded that the “Ukrainian authorities have allowed the deprivation of liberty of individuals in secret for prolonged periods of time.” Human rights monitors established that there is “a network of unofficial places of detention, often located in the basements of regional SBU buildings” not only in towns of Donbas, but also in Kharkiv, Odesa, Zaporizzhia, Poltava, and other cities. The authorities relied on volunteer battalions, particularly Azov and DUK Right Sector, to capture separatist suspects and interrogate them at their military bases before transferring them into government custody. Incommunicado detention has become an ordinary practice before suspects are officially registered in the criminal justice system. Some of the victims were taken into custody again immediately after their official release from prison and held in secret locations without charge, often for prisoner exchanges.

Continue reading the report, including graphs and charts here

Those same Neo-Nazis were freely marching through cities of Ukraine by the thousands recently to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the establishment of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which colluded with Nazi Germany in the massacre of tens of thousands of Poles and Jews during WWII.   Canadian Russia expert, Patrick Armstrong, summed up events for Ukraine in a recent post on his blog:

UKRAINE. Another coup in the making? Demonstrations kicked off by a torchlight parade. Demands (at the moment) are a new election law for parliamentarians, an anti-corruption court, ending parliamentary immunity. Signed by Tymoshenko and Saakashvili among many others including some of the nazi battalions. Perhaps not coincidentally, an investigation into fraud committed by President Poroshenko has been opened. Did the coal from Pennsylvania actually come from Russia? Nuclear fears. Another huge ammunition dump fire. The collapse continues.

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The U.S. continued its provocative behavior this past week with more military drills near South Korea as a North Korean official publicly stated how close to war the U.S. and North Korea are:

As the U.S. completes military drills off of South Korea’s eastern coast, a top North Korean official warned on Monday that “nuclear war can break out at any moment” and that the tensions that have escalated amid President Donald Trump’s threats have propelled the two countries to “the touch-and-go point.”

North Korea’s deputy ambassador to the United Nations said in his address to the U.N. General Assembly’s disarmament committee that the U.S. has not subjected any other country to “such an extreme and direct nuclear threat” in several decades.

It has also been revealed that the North Korean government made an attempt through a letter sent via diplomatic channels to Australia to get assistance in de-escalating tensions with Washington. The Australian government was apparently dismissive of the letter. Alexander Mercouris provided the following analysis (along with the full text of the letter at this link):

Australia seems to have entirely misread the letter as well as totally misunderstanding its context. The letter represented the DPRK’s attempt to create a bridge of dialogue between Pyongyang and one of America’s closet allies in the Pacific. For all of the speculation about whether North Korea is prepared to engage in dialogue, this letter proves once and for all that not only is North Korea willing to speak with traditional partners like Russia, but that Pyongyang is also capable of reaching out to US allies in an attempt to foment the same. The fact that Australia refused to read behind North Korea’s typically robust rhetoric to understand the wider context of the letter, represents a clear failure of basic human intelligence.

Readers of this blog will be familiar with the name of Eva Bartlett who has done fearless independent reporting from Syria, exposing much of the propaganda and misinformation that western corporate media and politicians have fed us for years.  Ms. Bartlett participated in a recent fact-finding trip to North Korea and has published a wonderful photo-essay on her visit, including some of the country’s successful infrastructure, education, culture and entertainment, and a health care system so well-functioning that it is “the envy of the developing wold”.  She also has quotes and photos from everyday North Koreans who are proud and resourceful, turning the average American’s view of North Korea as a gray dungeon where everyone is miserable and suffering on its head.

Propaganda and history aside, what we hardly ever see in articles on North Korea is the human side, some of the faces among the 25 million people at risk of being murdered or maimed by an American-led attack.

From August 24 to 31, 2017, I was part of a three-person delegation that independently visited the DPRK, with the intent of hearing from Koreans themselves about their country and history.

As it turned out, we heard also about their wishes for reunification with the South, their past efforts towards that goal, their desire for peace, but their refusal to be destroyed again. Following are snapshots and videos from my week in the country, with an effort to show the people and some of the impressive infrastructure and developments that corporate media almost certainly will never show.

Some sample photos:

Pyongyang’s Science and Technology Center, completed in 2015, is an expansive structure heated by geothermal energy, and with drip irrigation-watered live grass on inside walls. Its more than 3,000 computers are solar powered, the library has books in 12 foreign languages, and a long-distance learning program enables people from around the country to study and earn a degree equivalent to that of in-university studies.

See full photo-essay here

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“There are concerns that we continue to pursue. Collusion?  The committee continues to look into all the evidence to see if there was any hint of collusion.  Now, I’m not going to even discuss any initial findings because we haven’t any. ” -Committee Chairman Senator Richard Burr

This statement after going down the laundry list of all the thousands of pages of documents that have been reviewed, the hours of testimony heard, etc. over the course of an investigation that has gone on for a year or more, kind of says it all, don’t you think?

Mike Whitney has a full write-up over the Unz Review on just how absurd this has all become.