MediaTropes eJournal Vol VI, No 2 (2016): i–xi ISSN 1913-6005 www.mediatropes.com EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION INTELLIGENCE AND WAR STUART J. MURRAY, JONATHAN CHAU, AND TWYLA GIBSON On 2 February 2017, The Guardian reported on US President Donald J. Trump’s first foray into the theatre of war: “US officials say Trump approved counterterrorism operation without sufficient intelligence.” 1 Just five days after his blustering inauguration, quietly, and over dinner, the mission was approved “by Trump and his closest advisers, including his son-in-law Jared Kushner and his special adviser and former Breitbart executive Stephen Bannon, as well as defence secretary General Jim Mattis.” 2 One must wonder about the meaning of “sufficient intelligence,” how it might be measured, and who bears responsibil- ity when there are manifest insufficiencies all the way to the top of the “kill chain.” Trump quickly pronounced the mission “successful,” while the Pentagon repeated that it takes the utmost care to gather sufficient intelligence on potential “targets” by assessing their “patterns of life”—and presumably the lives of those civilians to be sacrificed as a mission’s “collateral damage.” 3 Reports suggest as many as 24 civilian deaths. 4 “Success” and “intelligence” amount, in some reckonings, to necroeconomies: what officials deem a tolerable threshold of civilian deaths, the acceptable ratio of enemy combatants to non-combatant civilians. And while President Trump justified the loss of life—including the lives of an American commando, an 8-year-old American citizen, and a newborn baby—on the basis of some “important intelligence that 1 Ewan MacAskill, Spencer Ackerman, and Jason Burke, “Questions Mount Over Botched Yemen Raid Approved by Trump,” The Guardian, 2 February 2017, retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/02/trump-approved-yemen-raid-five-days-after- inauguration. 2 Ibid. 3 Eric Schmitt, “Women Killed in Yemen Raid Were Qaeda Fighters, Pentagon Says,” The New York Times, 30 January 2017, retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/world/middleeast/yemen-raid-women-qaeda.html. 4 See “Yemen: Jeremy Scahill & Advocates Question ‘Success’ of Trump Raid That Killed 24 Civilians,” Democracy Now!, The War and Peace Report, 3 February 2017, retrieved from https://www.democracynow.org/2017/2/3/yemen_jeremy_scahill_advocates_question_success. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has published the names and ages of victims based on survivor testimony: https://twitter.com/tbij/status/829413081579188225.