The intelligence community must have certainty that the evidence is concrete to support the conclusion.
That inquiry fudged the issue of Blair's intent and his responsibility for overstating the certainty of intelligence.
No evidence that the tape is a hoax could be detected, but intelligence officials say 100percentt certainty is impossible given the poor quality of the recording.
He wishes researchers did not spend millions of dollars in pursuit of "artificial intelligence" in the blithe certainty that there is nothing inimitably unique about human consciousness.
The communication comes on a day when American officials plan to present the intelligence evidence for their certainty that the government of President Bashar al-Assad was behind chemical attacks that killed hundreds outside Damascus last week.
Obama's preëlection reticence to point out Russian interference for fear of politicizing the intelligence and his comfortable certainty of a Clinton victory will be regarded as two of the most significant errors of his Presidency.
Even though officials said changes were not being made as a direct result of the Iraq experience, the emerging conclusions seem to reflect fresh caution by intelligence analysts, whose prewar certainty that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons has been cast in doubt by the failure of American investigators to find any evidence of Iraqi stockpiles.
So by what measure can we claim to be successful so far?" Today's warning was the clearest sign yet of the near certainty in intelligence circles that the audiotaped message broadcast earlier this week, praising terror attacks in Bali and Kuwait, was an authentic recording by Mr. bin Laden.
And so he wants to make sure that we go through a rigorous checklist: The infeasibility of capture, the certainty of the intelligence base, the imminence of the threat, all of these things".
The Times quoted John Brennan, then a senior Presidential adviser and now our newly confirmed director of Central Intelligence, as explaining that the suspects went through a checklist that included "the infeasibility of capture, the certainty of the intelligence base, the imminence of the threat, all of these things".
