This evening's music features blues harp player Charlie Musselwhite.

Here are some stories from tonight's post:

French court summons ex-Guantanamo chief in torture probe

PARIS: A French court Thursday summoned former Guantanamo prison chief Geoffrey Miller over accusations of torture by two ex-detainees, in a move their lawyer said would open the door to further prosecutions.

Nizar Sassi and Mourad Benchellali, both French citizens, were arrested by U.S. forces in Afghanistan before being transferred to the notorious prison set up in Guantanamo Bay to hold terror suspects after the 9/11 attacks. ...

"The door has opened for civilian and military officials to be prosecuted over international crimes committed in Guantanamo," their lawyer William Bourdon said.

"This decision can only ... lead to other leaders being summoned." ...

In an expert report submitted to a French judge last year, lawyers for Sassi and Benchellali accused Miller of "an authorized and systematic plan of torture and ill-treatment on persons deprived of their freedom without any charge and without the basic rights of any detainee."

Miller, who was commander of the prison from 2002 to 2004 and is now retired, "bears individual criminal responsibility for the war crimes and acts of torture inflicted on detainees in U.S. custody at Guantanamo," according to the report.

'Dear Humanity, We Have a Systems Problem': New Project Aims to Promote Deep Solutions, Radical Transformation

"It's time to talk about what's next."

Those are the words of academic and author Gar Alperovitz, founder of the Democracy Collaborative, who—alongside veteran environmentalist Gus Speth—this week launched a new initiative called the "Next Systems Project" which seeks to address the interrelated threats of financial inequality, planetary climate disruption, and money-saturated democracies by advocating for deep, heretofore radical transformations of the current systems that govern the world's economies, energy systems, and political institutions. ...

"By defining issues systemically," the project organizers explain, "we believe we can begin to move the political conversation beyond current limits with the aim of catalyzing a substantive debate about the need for a radically different system and how we might go about its construction. Despite the scale of the difficulties, a cautious and paradoxical optimism is warranted. There are real alternatives. Arising from the unforgiving logic of dead ends, the steadily building array of promising new proposals and alternative institutions and experiments, together with an explosion of ideas and new activism, offer a powerful basis for hope."

The mission statement of the project—articulated in a short document titled It's Time to Face the Depth of the Systemic Crisis We Confront (pdf)—has been endorsed by an impressive list of more than 350 contemporary journalists, activists, academics, and thought leaders from various disciplines who all agree the current political and economic system is serving the interests of "corporate profits, the growth of GDP, and the projection of national power" while ignoring the needs and wellbeing of people, communities, ecosystems and the planet as a whole. ...

Next month, as part of the project's public engagement strategy, key members and supporters—including Alperovitz and Speth—will participate in an online webinar in order to expand the conversation about these ideas with people across the country.

There are lots of interesting details in this article, it's worth a full read.

Ukraine’s Oligarchs Turn on Each Other

In the never-never land of how the mainstream U.S. press covers the Ukraine crisis, the appointment last year of thuggish oligarch Igor Kolomoisky to govern one of the country’s eastern provinces was pitched as a democratic “reform” because he was supposedly too rich to bribe, without noting that his wealth had come from plundering the country’s economy.

In other words, the new U.S.-backed “democratic” regime, after overthrowing democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych because he was “corrupt,” was rewarding one of Ukraine’s top thieves by letting him lord over his own province, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, with the help of his personal army. ...

Last Thursday night, Kolomoisky and his armed men went to Kiev after the government tried to wrest control of the state-owned energy company UkrTransNafta from one of his associates. Kolomoisky and his men raided the company offices to seize and apparently destroy records. ... It was a revealing display of how the corrupt Ukrainian political-economic system works and the nature of the “reformers” whom the U.S. State Department has pushed into positions of power. According to BusinessInsider, the Kiev government tried to smooth Kolomoisky’s ruffled feathers by announcing “that the new company chairman [at UkrTransNafta] would not be carrying out any investigations of its finances.” ...

The clash resulted from the parliament’s vote last week to reduce Kolomoisky’s authority to run the company from his position as a minority owner. As part of the shakeup, Kolomoisky’s protégé Oleksandr Lazorko was fired as chairman, but he refused to leave and barricaded himself in his office, setting the stage for Kolomoisky’s arrival with armed men. ...

Kolomoisky also is believed to have purchased influence inside the U.S. government through his behind-the-scenes manipulation of Ukraine’s largest private gas firm, Burisma Holdings. Last year, the shadowy Cyprus-based company appointed Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, to its board of directors. Burisma also lined up well-connected lobbyists, some with ties to Secretary of State John Kerry, including Kerry’s former Senate chief of staff David Leiter, according to lobbying disclosures.

Iceland looks at ending boom and bust with radical money plan

Iceland's government is considering a revolutionary monetary proposal - removing the power of commercial banks to create money and handing it to the central bank. ...

According to a study by four central bankers, the country has had "over 20 instances of financial crises of different types" since 1875, with "six serious multiple financial crisis episodes occurring every 15 years on average".

Mr Sigurjonsson said the problem each time arose from ballooning credit during a strong economic cycle.

He argued the central bank was unable to contain the credit boom, allowing inflation to rise and sparking exaggerated risk-taking and speculation, the threat of bank collapse and costly state interventions.

In Iceland, as in other modern market economies, the central bank controls the creation of banknotes and coins but not the creation of all money, which occurs as soon as a commercial bank offers a line of credit.

The central bank can only try to influence the money supply with its monetary policy tools.

Under the so-called Sovereign Money proposal, the country's central bank would become the only creator of money.

Mandatory Water Restrictions in California Fail to Address Abuse of Resources

Also of interest:

The Pentagon Plan to ‘Divide and Rule’ the Muslim World

'Drones, Baby, Drones!' The Rise of America's High-Tech Assassins