Can We mourn? What military intelligence makes of a funeral

Funerals bring relationships into view without making them self-explanatory. A greeting can express kinship as well as organizational standing. At a funeral in North Waziristan, a drone crew treated such conduct as evidence of rank and mistook Mohammad Haqqani for his brother. The strike that followed is the point of departure for this piece. Read alongside military and police attention to funerals in Belfast, London and imperial St Petersburg, the episode raises a question about what intelligence adds to what it observes. Attendance becomes association. Prominence around a body becomes authority beyond the burial. Such readings can enter records whose consequences range from continued surveillance to killing. Funerals may be deliberately political, and the relationships inferred may be real. The political character of a funeral nevertheless leaves open what any one mourner’s presence establishes, and whose account of that presence survives.