With the recent Supreme Court decision granting detainees held at Guantanamo Bay the right to legal counsel challenging their imprisonment, one might look back at the treatment of spies, of prisoners of war held stateside during the 1940's, for lessons to apply in today's 9/11 environment.

First, there was the treatment of Nazi spies entering the U.S. during the summer of 1942. The plan was Operation Pastorius and the story is fascinating, worth the investigation of any World War II buff. . George John Dasch would lead it. He was a German who'd served in the German army in World War I, moved to America, then enlisted in the American army. He would live in New York working as a waiter. Then in the 1930's Dasch decided Germany needed him and returned home. With his American background, he was assigned by the German High Command to lead a group of saboteurs to terrorize America. The grandiose plot was to bomb vulnerable spots along the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, destroy bridges in New York City, blow up a railroad depot in New Jersey, and aluminum plants in Tennessee, New York, and Illinois. If possible, conduct strikes for the pure terror of it on New York's Broadway. Transported by a German U-Boat submarine, four of the spies including Dasch walked ashore in Long Island. Four others landed on the beach outside of Jacksonville, Florida. To make a long story short, Dasch's "American side" evidently motivated him to tip off the FBI and aborted the plan. The lesson is what the government under FDR did in this case. All eight were put on trial in July 1942 by a military tribunal. Six were executed by electrocution by August 1942. Dasch and a second member were spared the death penalty, eventually returned to Germany after the end of the war.

Second, it would be fair to say few countries ever treated its prisoners of war better than we did. German and Italian prisoners interned in the U.S., many in Arizona, were fed as well or better than we fed our own soldiers. These prisoners had the freedom to indulge in artwork, form musical groups, and have recreation. In fact, many prisoners, especially the Germans, were becoming so friendly with the Americans, their hard-line Nazi members would retaliate with beatings in private and threats of death.

Third, we had the Japanese Internment camps, taking hundreds of thousands of Americans of Japanese descent along the West Coast, including Star Trek's George Takai, otherwise

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