Scanners don't use laser illuminators, don't worry on that account. Very bright light still isn't good for your eyes, so it's better to not look straight into the light if you can help it. (Though I think you'd have more problems with eyestrain rather than any damage to the retina as such.)
As for debinding, I really recommend it. It ends up being about the same amount of work as not debinding, but the result is
much better.
Using an iron is The Way to go here, of course.
As for rotation, there is no escape from it. Sure, you can try aligning the pages as much as you want while you scan them, but it will all be for nothing since the art is (practically) never printed straight anyway. A word of warning here too, don't jam the pages up against the edge of the scanner bed in an attempt to align them well. Most scanners ignore the areas closest to the edge, so you cut off too much for no good reason.
My own "flow" goes something like this:
Batch scan an arseload of pages at once, with IrfanView, at 600dpi. (And save as TIFF, just to keep things fast.)
Rotate them with
my cruddy rotation app.
Batch level with PS, at the same time applying some slight filtering magic.
Autocrop what can be autocropped, and save as PNG. (Pages with black edges are for instance usually not possible to autocrop.)
Crush the PNGs.
Send off the hundreds of megs to unsuspecting editors.
Oh, and to answer one of your original questions, there's no real reason to scan black/white pages in more than 256-level greyscale. It can theoretically be better to use 24-bit colour and then converting with a bit of trickery in PS so you can keep most of your editing at (a somewhat) real 16-bit greyscale. But in practice, it doesn't make a difference in the end result. Colour pages must be 24-bit colour, of course.
