Evidence gathered through forms of torture and without the protection of judicial restraint in Guantanamo Bay was dissected by insider attorney Tom Fleener in the Campanile Room in the Memorial Union on Monday.

Fleener, an Ames native, has served on the Guantanamo Bay military defense council and also has an extensive military background, serving as an Army JAG officer prosecuting and defending soldiers around the world for eight years. After two years, Fleener’s lobbying of Congress finally afforded defendants in Gitmo a choice of council.

The constitutionality of the Gitmo compound was the main topic of Fleener’s discussion, as he outlined the many ways that the federal government, after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, broke its own laws and the laws of the Geneva Convention, to collect information and to interrogate terror suspects.

“The president, in his role as commander in chief, truly believes that he can do anything he wants, from setting up military tribunals and councils to warrantless interrogation, and Congress has nothing to do with it. He gets to decide everything and no one has a say in it,” Fleener said.

Fleener said from late 2001 to June 2004, Congress and the president had decided they did not need to comply with the Geneva Conventions – which afforded the Army “the right” to collect information any way it wanted, with “torture lite” – the use of acts such as waterboarding, sleep deprivation, the use of dogs or fake menstrual blood, and disrespecting Ramadan.

“I can say with certainty that out of the 1,000 that were brought into Guantanamo Bay, there were no big fish like Osama bin Laden, until 2006. These people were not plucked from the battlefields in Afghanistan,” Fleener said.

After the media and the courts began to inquire into the “black hole that is Guantanamo Bay,” some limited form of legal council was awarded to them. Fleener became involved in 2005, defending detainees under “courts without any legal basis.”

The Military Commissions Act of 2006, which suspended habeas corpus rights for non-citizens, was a “terrible, terrible bit of legislation,” said Fleener, because it also allowed information gathered from January 2001 to December 2005 to be used in court.

Fleener said this information was gathered under torturous standards, and it created this quandary: “What is the difference information gathered by waterboarding before December 2005 and information gathered on New Year’s Eve of 2005?”

Fleener offered three solutions to the problem – close Guantanamo Bay, restore the right of habeas corpus to detainees, and abolish the Military Commissions Act.

“Guantanamo Bay is not under a system of justice, it’s not something that America should be proud of, and it’s an affront to the Constitution,” Fleener said.

The secrecy of the military base is still prevalent today, as few of those who attended the lecture knew many specifics.

“It’s just a interesting topic and it’s a constitutional crisis, and that is interesting to me,” said Shin Heng Chang, graduate student in journalism and mass communication.

“I figured if I attended this speech that I would learn more about the constitution and issues in America.”