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Eight Is Enough

By Michael WeissUpdated Friday, April 27, 2007, at 6:26 PM ET

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"If I understand Tenet's claim correctly," writes criminal law professor Dan Markel at PrawfsBlawg, "he thinks there's a world of difference between a) the quality of the intelligence indicating the wisdom of military action and b) the need to better present the case for the wisdom of military action. Normally, I'd be inclined to agree with him if and only if the person making the assessment were a critical outsider to the conversation. But Tenet was the inside intelligence man and he doesn't give much indication…that he felt at the time that the quality of the intelligence indicating the wisdom of military action was poor or misleading."

At the Washington Monthly's Political Animal, liberal Kevin Drum smells a revisionist rat: "Well....color me unconvinced. Given a couple of years to think it over, that's probably the kind of story I'd come up with too, but I think I'd try to make it more believable. Frankly, the table-pounding declaration that something is a 'slam dunk' doesn't really sound like the kind of thing you'd say if you were merely agreeing that your PowerPoint presentation could use some sprucing up, does it?"

Read more about Tenet's revelations.

The wound and the bow: Mstislav Rostropovich, the celebrated Russian cellist and conductor, has died at 80. Rostropovich was a brave dissident who fought Soviet censorship and repression, giving safe haven to embattled novelist and historian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and writing an incisive anti-statist open letter to Pravda during the "re-Stalinization" years of Brezhnev. For this, Rostropovich and his wife had their travel freedoms rescinded and the cellist found himself greeted with fewer and fewer concert venues.

Xanthippas at Three Wise Men remembers the cellist as "one of a number of truly great musicians to come out of the Soviet era, and to me it's simply amazing that he and so many of his fellow musicians-such as Dmitri Shostakovitch and Sergei Prokofiev-were able to flourish even under the suffocating tyranny of a Soviet regime that viewed them merely as tools of propaganda against the West."

Archer at Lawyerworldland explains Rostropovich's inimitable technique: "He perched his cello on a metal pin, the way all cellists do, except his pin was so long the instrument was practically in his lap. In the softer passages, his playing could make you look around, spooked, the pencil-slender beam of sound seeming to come from out there someplace. It was possible to deny that Mstislav Rostropovich was from some other galaxy, one of the Overlords come to show us how it was done, but that unfortunately left you with the job of coming up with with some alternative explanation for it all, and you'd rather not try."

Read more about the Rostropovich's passing.