Ethicists, investigators and human rights professionals have a particular interest in getting their findings right.

Judge Richard Goldstone, head of the infamous UN panel that issued the Goldstone Report in 2009, backtracked on his most serious accusations on Friday. The Goldstone Report had accused Israel and Hamas of “actions amounting to war crimes, possibly crimes against humanity” during the 2008 Gaza War. Goldstone’s about-face includes a reversal on the contentious claim that Israel intentionally targeted Palestinian civilians. Investigations into some 400 incidents from the war, cited by another recent UN report, “indicate that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy,” Goldstone wrote in an op-ed published in the Washington Post: “I regret that our fact-finding mission did not have such evidence explaining the circumstances in which we said civilians in Gaza were targeted, because it probably would have influenced our findings about intentionality and war crimes.”Goldstone starkly admitted, “If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.”

Several legal and human rights critics of Goldstone say that there is no new information, that these facts were always in the public domain, and have been pointing to these sources in public since the Goldstone Report was tabled. What accountability, transparency and responsibility lessons to you think are applicable?