The Outlaw Presidency

"The book says that the International Committee of the Red Cross declared in the report, given to the C.I.A. last year, that the methods used on Abu Zubaydah, the first major Qaeda figure the United States captured, were 'categorically' torture, which is illegal under both American and international law.

"The book says Abu Zubaydah was confined in a box 'so small he said he had to double up his limbs in the fetal position' and was one of several prisoners to be 'slammed against the walls,' according to the Red Cross report. The C.I.A. has admitted that Abu Zubaydah and two other prisoners were waterboarded, a practice in which water is poured on the nose and mouth to create the sensation of suffocation and drowning....

"The book says Abu Zubaydah told the Red Cross that he had been waterboarded at least 10 times in a single week and as many as three times in a day....

"Citing unnamed 'sources familiar with the report,' Ms. Mayer wrote that the Red Cross document 'warned that the abuse constituted war crimes, placing the highest officials in the U.S. government in jeopardy of being prosecuted.'...

"'The Dark Side' also describes a frightening false alarm at the White House on Oct. 18, 2001, when, it says, an alarm went off on a machine designed to detect biological, chemical or radiological attacks. According to the book, among those who believed they might have been exposed to a pathogen was Vice President Dick Cheney.

"Ms. Mayer quotes an unnamed 'former administration official' as saying, 'They thought that Cheney was already lethally infected.'"

Joby Warrick writes in The Washington Post: "A CIA analyst warned the Bush administration in 2002 that up to a third of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay may have been imprisoned by mistake, but White House officials ignored the finding and insisted that all were 'enemy combatants' subject to indefinite incarceration, according to a new book critical of the administration's terrorism policies.

"The CIA assessment directly challenged the administration's claim that the detainees were all hardened terrorists -- the 'worst of the worst,' as then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said at the time. But a top aide to Vice President Cheney shrugged off the report and squashed proposals for a quick review of the detainees' cases, author Jane Mayer writes in 'The Dark Side,' scheduled for release next week.

"'There will be no review,' the book quotes Cheney staff director David Addington as saying. 'The president has determined that they are ALL enemy combatants. We are not going to revisit it.' "

Publisher Random House, via blogger Steve Clemmons, promises disclosures about:

* "The unorthodox CIA psychologists who advocated the use of Cold War KGB methods intended to obtain false confessions, and the near complete lack of actionable intelligence gained from these un-American techniques....

* "The fear of criminal charges that drove the CIA to destroy interrogation videotapes ­ and what the tapes may have shown....