A/HRC/41/CRP.1 Special Rapporteur found a worrying tendency to value Intelligence information and leaks of it, over facts and evidence. 39. Intelligence gatherers generally operate in anticipation of an event that may, or may never, take place and in pursuit of information, rather than evidence, that may provide a government, institution, or corporation with an advantage. Intelligence gathering is an openended process, and there is rarely a definitive point at which “enough” intelligence has been harvested. Think of a conveyer belt moving information from often disparate sources constantly in front of intelligence officers. At some point, there comes a time when an intelligence service or operative simply has to make a stab at assimilating what all this means. There is rarely space for scrutiny from anyone outside the intelligence system. Outsiders may be readily manipulated given they are unlikely to access the raw data or its sources. All these considerations figured large in the Special Rapporteur inquiry and in her assessment of the information to which she had access. 40. The Special Rapporteur was provided access to recordings of conversations inside the Saudi Consulate – from 28 September to 2 October, 2019 and pre-dating the killing of Mr. Kashoggi. She also had access to a recording of the killing on the afternoon of October 2 of Mr. Kashoggi inside the Consulate itself. 41. Her review of these recordings has a number of limitations: (a) Recordings of only seven different conversations over a two-day period were made available to the inquiry. Combined these amounted to 45 minutes of tape, when, according to Turkish Intelligence, they had access to at least seven hours of recordings. The remaining six hours and 15 minutes may or may not be relevant to the inquiry, but without doubt there remains much more recorded information than that made available to the Special Rapporteur. (b) The Special Rapporteur was not allowed to obtain clones of the recordings so she could not authenticate any of the recordings. Among other aspects, such authentication would have involved examination of the recordings’ metadata such as when, how the data were created, the time and date of creation and the source and the process used to create it. (c) The Special Rapporteur was accompanied by her own Arabic-English interpreter. However, she was not permitted to retain any transcript of the recordings not even what was purported to be an accurate English transcript. Her delegation was also asked not to take notes while listening to the recordings. (d) Raw intelligence materials do not “divulge” their full stories immediately, as those close to Turkey’s investigation advised. Background noises have to be interpreted; conversations thought to be insignificant initially can become meaningful once more information comes to light. In this instance, some of the available recordings were less clear acoustically than others, making identification of those speaking difficult and making interpretation of what was happening at any given time difficult too. For instance, on the basis of recordings, the Special Rapporteur could not reach firm conclusions about what they were told was the sound of a “saw” in operation. The Turkish authorities undoubtedly have more information and intelligence about events in the Saudi Consulate than they were willing or able to share with the inquiry. Standards of credibility 42. To avoid privileging allegations or information shaped to a particular narrative, the Special Rapporteur sought to consider equally all the facts that were brought to her attention and subject these to a similar standard of validation. 43. To determine the credibility of information she received, the Special Rapporteur sought, through cross-checking, to pay careful regard to the relevance, weight and reliability of sources as well as to their relationship to the body of information, as a whole or evaluated it by inductive reasoning. An allegation was deemed to be credible “if there was a reasonable 10