A little over a month ago, I pub­lished a report that con­clu­sively demon­strated for the first time that the U.S. financed Hugo Banzer’s 1971 coup in Bolivia. That report relied in part on a tran­script of a con­ver­sa­tion that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger had on the morn­ing June 11, 1971.

Now it turns out that another con­ver­sa­tion Nixon and Kissinger had during that same meet­ing adds more evi­dence for the long-​held sus­pi­cion that the CIA par­tic­i­pated in the murder of Rene Schnei­der, the Chilean army commander-in-chief.

Here’s the Wash­ing­ton Post’s Jeff Stein report­ing on the new tran­scripts (PDF) released by nixontapes.org:

“1945-1998″ by Isao Hashimoto

1/ From “Antagonism and Crisis,” Joshua Clover’s talk for the Rethink­ing Poet­ics conference:

But what do we lose, in this nuanc­ing? We lose too much. If we don’t lose much descrip­tively, we lose the one idea, the one real sit­u­a­tion that the dis­tinc­tion has been trying to pre­serve: that there is a fun­da­men­tal antag­o­nism, that it has two sides, and that they are set against each other in a dynamic that is not eter­nal and abstract but con­crete and his­tor­i­cal. And the loss of this idea is unhap­pier for poetry than any hap­pi­ness we might gain by doing away with the distinction.

…

Anyway this Third Way, this Amer­i­can Hybrid, gen­er­ally uses the lan­guage of “get­ting past” the fun­da­men­tal antag­o­nisms between the dominant-​mainstream and the emergent-​experimental (these terms are inex­act, but fairly well-​understood). The con­cep­tion of the hybrid is that we can simply choose to leave the antag­o­nism behind.

2/ From the intro­duc­tion to Clover’s inter­view with MIA in the new Believer:

Rioter or pas­sen­ger, out­sider or insider, rev­o­lu­tion­ary or sell­out? The cat­e­gories don’t work so well these days, if they ever did. This is the point, inevitably, of the music, and it is the music that mat­ters. It is art for a moment when cat­e­gories aren’t work­ing very well, when things are falling apart and cen­ters aren’t hold­ing. It does not try to con­tain this sit­u­a­tion but to reg­is­ter it, to give it a feel­ing, to get a sense of whether it might indeed be late in something—pop music, his­tory, the U.S. empire.

This is a big deal for Chicago. Let John Conroy, the man who broke the Burge story in the first place, tell you how it went and what it means:

The jury reached a ver­dict today shortly after 3:00 pm, the second full day of delib­er­a­tion, find­ing former police com­man­der Jon Burge guilty of per­jury and obstruc­tion of justice.

…

The Burge ver­dict is a major vic­tory for the U.S. Attor­ney Patrick Fitzger­ald and the pros­e­cu­tors who argued the case before Judge Joan Lefkow and a slap in the face of Cook County State’s Attor­neys who repeat­edly turned a blind eye to the tor­ture. The pros­e­cu­tion came 37 years after Burge first used elec­tric shock to inter­ro­gate Anthony Holmes and decades after county pros­e­cu­tors had evi­dence that seri­ous crimes had been and were being com­mit­ted by Burge and detec­tives under his com­mand. Even as a dozen men awaited exe­cu­tion on the basis of sus­pect con­fes­sions, county pros­e­cu­tors declined to inves­ti­gate whether those con­fes­sions had been coerced and whether detec­tives had per­jured them­selves in tes­ti­fy­ing about how those state­ments had been extracted.