I will respond in two ways.
What I tried to say in my opening remarks is that I'm proud to live in a country where we have intelligence agencies that are on the job 24-7 and are reporting what they hear. They have various means to hear things from human sources, from electronic sources and so on. It is their responsibility to pass that information up to people such as me and others who are senior members of the national security community.
The information always comes with.... I never know who it's from, but it is characterized as to its degree of newness or reliability and what we know about the source. Sometimes it openly says, “We don't know why the person is.... We may be being told this to influence us rather than to inform us.” The consummation or the daily receipt of intelligence comes with grains of salt. I, myself, am not putting those grains of salt in.
The second point is that it is one input into how people such as me form a world view and use that world view to inform the government. Here I would point to the example used in my introductory remarks, that there was a consensus view in the western intelligence community or the U.S. intelligence community that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. That was wrong.
Therefore, it is entirely appropriate for intelligence to be one stream of information that goes into the decision-making process of policy-makers.