During the summer of 2003, President Bush spent a good deal of time worrying about a severed head, writes Ron Suskind.

The body part, flown by the CIA in a box from Afghanistan to Washington, supposedly belonged to Ayman al-Zawahiri, mastermind behind al-Qaida's Sept. 11 attacks on America.

While waiting for DNA results, Bush regularly grilled agents about the skull, suggesting at one point in his office that if it was al-Zawahiri's, "I hope you bring it here."

It was not.

		"THE ONE PERCENT DOCTRINE: DEEP INSIDE AMERICA'S PURSUIT OF ITS ENEMIES SINCE 9/11" By Ron Suskind. Simon & Schuster ($27)

The story of al-Zawahiri's head is one of many nuggets in Suskind's wide-ranging chronicle of how the administration responded to 9/11, then moved on to the military occupation of Iraq.

In some ways, it's a faster-moving, less pretentious account than Bob Woodward's "Plan of Attack." Suskind names most of his sources, seeming more interested than Woodward, the consummate Beltway insider, in preserving his entree to federal government corridors through anonymity.

The principal players here are Vice President Dick Cheney, who inspired Suskind's title, and former CIA chief George Tenet, forever tarred by Woodward's book with his "slam dunk" pronouncement that Iraq was loaded with weapons of mass destruction.

The Cheney "doctrine" -- if there is a 1 percent chance of a threat to the United States, military action is necessary -- became the foundation for the decision to invade Iraq, Suskind says.

Unveiled in a speech Aug. 26, 2002, Cheney said of potential threats, "We will simply not look away, hope for the best and leave the matter for some future administration to resolve."

Suskind then adds that statement to Bush's personal tendency to land the first blow, warranted or not, just to show who's in charge. "A game changer," Bush called his approach, learned on the basketball court where he was known for his dirty play aimed at the other team's best player.

"A sudden blow for no reason is better than one for good reason" is how Suskind explains Bush's philosophy.

As brother Jeb says, "He truly enjoys getting people to knuckle under."

Suskind carefully picks apart the administration's WMD claims, exonerating Tenet, who downplays his "slam dunk" statement, and indicting National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice among others for blaming the CIA when the case unraveled.

Their goal, says Suskind, was to protect the president, an activity that kept Cheney and staff occupied frequently as well.

Much of this book portrays the hard-working agents of the CIA and the FBI as the frontline heroes in the war on terror, describing in detail their successes and failures in this bewildering struggle.

A major breakthrough came in the world of international finance when American operatives tapped into data banks to follow the money. Recent disclosures that the administration was using a private finance company to track terrorists sounds like old news after reading Suskind.

Taking off from his controversial previous book, "The Price of Loyalty," a history of Paul O'Neill's troubled tenure as Bush's treasury secretary, Suskind has advanced his personality study of Bush, who depends on his gut rather than his brain to make decisions.

His portrait here is a blend of sincerity and naivete, kindness and cruelty, discipline and rigidity, all marked by the absence of intellectual curiosity.

Cheney comes across as a caricature by comedians, a humorless, arbitrary, political creature uninterested in any variation to his neo-conservative view.

As others learned before they were fired, "Saying no to the vice president is the wrong answer."

Tenet emerges as a hard-charging "man's man," who believed in personal loyalty, but was ultimately betrayed by Bush and Cheney despite his allegiance.

To his credit, Suskind is a neutral reporter throughout his book, taking an even-handed, non-partisan view of this controversial administration facing new and intractable problems.

But he is troubled by many of its actions, particularity the use of torture that, in one known case, involved threats to the young children of a suspect.

Suskind concludes that in its claim of moral superiority against the "axis of evil," the Bush administration has often neglected to live up to its own standards.

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