Neither Shaw or Carroll are very good at joining up the dots. Both firmly believe that anyone making a statement, or comment, must fully substantiate what they say. The same rule however never seems to apply to them.

Now in the case of UN Watch, whose stated mission is "to monitor the performance of the United Nations by the yardstick of its own Charter". I would have thought it natural and logical for that NGO to monitor the work of any UN Committee. NOBODY has to commission any such monitoring operation, in fact it is important that it is not compelled by any outside organisation. The UNHCR is one commission UN Watch has monitored closely. UN Watch questions its impartiality and its bias, so when the UNHCR were asked by the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation to investigated the conduct of operations in Gaza UN Watch did the same.

The UNHCR settled on the following personnel to conduct this investigation:

Head of the mission - Justice Richard Goldstone, former judge of the Constitutional Court of South Africa and former Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.

Christine Chinkin, Professor of International Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Hina Jilani, Advocate of the Supreme Court of Pakistan and a member of the International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur in 2004.

Desmond Travers, a former colonel in the Irish Defence Forces and member of the Board of Directors of the Institute for International Criminal Investigations.

There was trouble over the mandate of this investigation from the outset as the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation only requested that the Commission only investigate the actions and operations of the IDF. To his credit Richard Goldstone refused to accept the appointment until the remit was widened to include the other combatants, this was done informally.

So you have a team undertaking an investigation on military operations that consists of three jurists and one professional soldier with no combat command experience.

The UN Watch Team detailed by bobad would be proposed and approved by the directing board of UN Watch. A much larger team with greater experience and capability when it comes to assessing and analysing military operations than the team put forward by the UNHCR.

"Critics of the Goldstone report claimed that it contained methodological failings, legal and factual errors, and falsehoods, and devoted insufficient attention to the allegations that Hamas was deliberately operating in heavily populated areas of Gaza.

On 1 April 2011, Goldstone retracted his claim that it was Israeli government policy to deliberately target citizens"