One year after the revelations of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, journalists are still reporting stories about similar abuse. While the recent Newsweek article alleging Koran desecration at Guantanamo was retracted, it again fanned the fiery debate of how to prosecute our enemies without compromising our moral standing.

Which is why trial lawyer Pierce O'Donnell's new nonfiction history of Nazi saboteurs on American soil is so timely and topical. It's an examination of the thin grey line between the techniques used to interrogate and then prosecute our enemies, and the rule of law laid down by our Constitution and centuries' old body of jurisprudence, established by judges and juries since the Revolutionary War.

In Time of War: Hitler's Terrorist Attack on America is a detailed account of a German plot launched in 1942 to blow up key industrial facilities and retail establishments on American soil, designed to crippled our armaments industry and spread fear among the populace. It bears unsettling reminders of the 9/11 attacks, with one important distinction: The German plot was stopped.

The saboteurs were captured soon after they disembarked in New York and Florida from Nazi U-boats cruising precariously close to the homeland.

Anxious to calm public fears, President Roosevelt convened a secret military commission to try them under special "laws of war." The commission announced that six defendants would be executed and two would linger in prison. Years later, the Bush administration has cited the case as a precedent for holding "enemy combatants" in the War on Terrorism without allowing them a public trial or access to legal counsel.

O'Donnell, named as one of "100 Most Influential Lawyers" by National Law Journal, spins his plot like a thriller, while occasionally bogging down in dry recreations of the commission's prosecution of the defendants, two of whom were American citizens of German extraction.

O'Donnell notes that the reason the men were picked by German military intelligence was because all of the Nazis had lived stateside. The situation is eerily reminiscent of the 9/11 hijackers in that they, too, had lived here, taking advantage of America's lax immigration laws, before eventually wreaking their havoc.

O'Donnell takes his facts and law seriously, and his thoroughly researched book highlights mistakes that were made, both in apprehension and prosecution of the strike team. The reader learns that an unarmed Coast Guard employee was the first to spot the New York saboteur unit on the shores of Long Island - not the FBI, as ace media manipulator J. Edgar Hoover implied.

And George John Dasch - recruited to lead the terrorists - turns out to have been planning to expose the plot to authorities once he reached American soil, because of his love for our democratic way of life.

O'Donnell deftly reveals the complicated psychological undercarriage of a supposedly black-and-white plot, while detailing the almost-funny dining, partying and romantic activities of the eight as they re-establish their American social networks before being caught.

The main lawyer for seven of the eight defendants, an army officer named Col. Royall, took his job so seriously he managed to get the case considered by the Supreme Court, when it became obvious the military commission had decided, before the proceedings even began, to have the men shot.

"FDR needed a showcase trial," O'Donnell writes, "to demonstrate to the American people and Hitler that the United States could protect itself from enemy spies and saboteurs."

The commission convened in July 1942 and was composed of military officers who reached a verdict within a couple of weeks. The German citizens were condemned to death, while the two American citizens of German extraction were sentenced to life in prison.

Royall becomes the hero of the book, a defender of constitutional and judicial rights, with O'Donnell putting him on a pedestal with splashes of purple prose. The counselor's skirmishes with Attorney General Biddle, the lead prosecutor, read like today's courtroom dramas on television, but without a good soundtrack.

But O'Donnell saves the fireworks of In Time of War for the end of the book, where the writer ties in this 63-year-old case to today's civil liberties, specifically referencing the alleged terrorists of Rumsfeld v. Padilla and Hamdi v. Rumsfeld. Both of these cases involve American citizens, and turf battles between the executive branch, the judicial branch and constitutional guarantees.

The jury is still out on these contemporary cases, but the treatment of those Nazi saboteurs shines a provocative light on the Bush administration's legal position.

Kelly Lemieux is a Denver-based journalist who has also written for Westword and San Francisco and New York publications.