Ditching the ‘Disposal Plan’: Revisiting Miranda in an Age of Terror

Abstract:     
In addition to raising doubts about the fairness and legitimacy of the U.S. detainee policies, torturing suspected terrorists poses the more immediate problem of, as former CIA chief of European operations Tyler Drumheller phrased it: “[w]hat are you going to do with these people?” If a detainee is prosecuted, the accused will argue that his confession and any corroborating evidence elicited through torture should be excluded. Consequently, CIA interrogators have little incentive to keep terror suspects alive after their intelligence value has been exhausted. Moreover, a living victim of CIA interrogation methods is a prospective witness in the potential criminal prosecution of the CIA agent who performed the interrogation. The fear of prosecution for violating federal torture statutes is so real for CIA interrogators that many of them have purchased professional liability insurance to offset the costs of any legal fees associated with their criminal defense. For any agent, a tempting solution is “the disposal plan,” a euphemism for the extrajudicial killing of terror suspects.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 28

Accepted Paper Series