Thank you for your question.
I want to be very clear that what I said before was not intended to question the competence of CSIS.
To be very clear on this very important point, I will respond in English.
The point I was trying to make is that intelligence reports that come across my desk every morning—and that have come across my desk every morning for five or six years—come with qualifiers and caveats. They are not an account of what happened. They are often an account of what somebody said might have happened.
The qualifications, the qualifiers and the caveats come as parts of the documents that our intelligence agencies produce, and that is to help us, as consumers, understand the reliability of what we are reading. They use phrases such as “a news source”, “a news source of unknown reliability” or “a single uncorroborated source alleges that”—this means that one person said it and that they have not heard it anywhere else by any other means. That is how intel comes to those of us who read it on a daily basis.
The point I am trying to make is that when leaked reports are circulating and those caveats are not taken into account, people can get a very distorted view of what the national security community in this country actually believes.