A closed-circuit television in the mega-church outside Atlanta showed the president smiling uncomfortably.

"But Coretta knew, and we know," Lowery continued, "That there are weapons of misdirection right down here," he said, nodding his head toward the row of presidents past and present. "For war, billions more, but no more for the poor!" The crowd again cheered wildly.

Former President Jimmy Carter later swung at Bush as well, not once but twice. As he talked about the Kings, he said: "It was difficult for them then personally with the civil liberties of both husband and wife violated as they became the target of secret government wiretaps." The crowd cheered as Bush, under fire for a secret wiretapping program he ordered after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, again smiled weakly.

Later, Carter said Hurricane Katrina showed that all are not yet equal in America.

"This commerative cermony this morning, this afternoon, is not only to acknowledge the great contributions of Coretta and Martin, but to remind us that the struggle for equal rights is not over. We only have to recall the color of the faces of those in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi," Carter said, the rest of his sentence drowned out by loud applause. "Those who were most devastated by [Hurricane] Katrina know that there are not yet equal opportunities for all Americans. It is our responsibility to continue their crusade."

"When you look at disaster stories, it is usually that first time using a new piece of equipment that something is going to fall apart," says Kimball Brace, president of Election Data Services, which maintains data on voting systems across the country.

Brace's latest update, to be released today, shows that at least 647 of the nation's 3,114 counties will be using new voting machines this year, more than at any time since records began in 1980 and probably ever, he said. Those jurisdictions are home to 30.6 million registered voters, or almost a fifth of the national total.

Voters used to manual machines with levers or punch-card devices could instead be seeing touch screens or optical scanners. "Election administrators have never been through (this) amount of change," says Doug Lewis, director of the Election Center, which helps train election officials. "It would be an absolute miracle if we don't have hiccups."

The rapid change is propelled by the 2002 Help America Vote Act, which mandated upgrades in voting equipment and processes. About one-third of states missed deadlines for upgrading equipment or making it fully accessible to the disabled, says Doug Chapin, president of Electionline.org, a non-profit group that studies voting.

Progress has been made toward eliminating antiquated voting equipment, Brace's data show. Punch cards, which introduced the term "hanging chad" into the nation's lexicon after Florida's troubles in the 2000 presidential election, are being used by one-fifth as many voters as in 2000. The use of lever machines has been cut in half; most are in New York.

Linda Lamone, administrator of the Maryland Board of Elections and president of the National Association of State Election Directors, says widespread worries about glitches include:

• Is there enough time to educate voters and poll workers, many of them older and not proficient with computers, before Election Day?

• Will there be adequate tech support from voting-machine manufacturers?

• How will the 25 states that require a paper backup for their computerized machines handle that — and which record will be the official one for any recount?

"Election officials are worried," Brace says. "A lot of them are saying, 'Why didn't I retire last year?' "

Ms. Wilson, who was a National Security Council aide in the administration of President Bush's father, is the first Republican on either the House's Intelligence Committee or the Senate's to call for a full Congressional investigation into the program, in which the N.S.A. has been eavesdropping without warrants on the international communications of people inside the United States believed to have links with terrorists.

The congresswoman's discomfort with the operation appears to reflect deepening fissures among Republicans over the program's legal basis and political liabilities. Many Republicans have strongly backed President Bush's power to use every tool at his disposal to fight terrorism, but 4 of the 10 Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee voiced concerns about the program at a hearing where Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales testified on Monday.

A growing number of Republicans have called in recent days for Congress to consider amending federal wiretap law to address the constitutional issues raised by the N.S.A. operation.

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, for one, said he considered some of the administration's legal justifications for the program "dangerous" in their implications, and he told Mr. Gonzales that he wanted to work on new legislation that would help those tracking terrorism "know what they can and can't do."

But the administration has said repeatedly since the program was disclosed in December that it considers further legislation unnecessary, believing that the president already has the legal authority to authorize the operation.

Vice President Dick Cheney reasserted that position Tuesday in an interview on "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer."

Members of Congress "have the right and the responsibility to suggest whatever they want to suggest" about changing wiretap law, Mr. Cheney said. But "we have all the legal authority we need" already, he said, and a public debate over changes in the law could alert Al Qaeda to tactics used by American intelligence officials.

"It's important for us, if we're going to proceed legislatively, to keep in mind there's a price to be paid for that, and it might well in fact do irreparable damage to our capacity to collect information," Mr. Cheney said.

The administration, backed by Republican leaders in both houses, has also resisted calls for inquiries by either Congress or an independent investigator.

As for the politics, some Republicans say they are concerned that prolonged public scrutiny of the surveillance program could prove a distraction in this year's midterm Congressional elections, and the administration has worked to contain any damage by aggressively defending the legality of the operation. It has also limited its Congressional briefings on the program's operational details to the so-called Gang of Eight — each party's leaders in the Senate and the House and on the two intelligence committees — and has agreed to full committee briefings only on the legal justifications for the operation, without discussing in detail how the N.S.A. conducts it.

Ms. Wilson said in the interview Tuesday that she considered the limited Congressional briefings to be "increasingly untenable" because they left most lawmakers knowing little about the program. She said the House Intelligence Committee needed to conduct a "painstaking" review, including not only classified briefings but also access to internal documents and staff interviews with N.S.A. aides and intelligence officials.

Ms. Wilson, a former Air Force officer who is the only female veteran currently in Congress, has butted up against the administration previously over controversial policy issues, including Medicare and troop strength in Iraq. She said she realized that publicizing her concerns over the surveillance program could harm her relations with the administration. "The president has his duty to do, but I have mine too, and I feel strongly about that," she said.

Asked whether the White House was concerned about support for the program among Republicans, Dana Perino, a presidential spokeswoman, said: "The terrorist surveillance program is critical to the safety and protection of all Americans, and we will continue to work with Congress. The attorney general testified at length yesterday, and he will return to Capitol Hill twice more before the week ends."

Aides to Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, who as chairman of the full House Intelligence Committee is one of the eight lawmakers briefed on the operations of the program, said he could not be reached for comment on whether he would be open to a full inquiry.

Mr. Hoekstra has been a strong defender of the program and has expressed no intention thus far to initiate a full review. In two recent letters to the Congressional Research Service, he criticized reports by the agency that raised questions about the legal foundations of the N.S.A. program and the limited briefings given to Congress. He said in one letter that it was "unwise at best and reckless at worst" for the agency to prepare a report on classified matters that it knew little about.

But two leading Democratic members of the intelligence committees, Representative Jane Harman and Senator Dianne Feinstein, both of California, wrote a letter of their own Tuesday defending the nonpartisan research service's reports on the surveillance program and other issues, saying its work had been "very helpful" in view of what they deemed the minimal information provided by the administration.

Q: Does the president think he should obey the law? He put his hand on the Bible twice to uphold the Constitution. Wiretapping is not legal under the circumstances without a warrant.

MR. MCCLELLAN: Well, I guess you didn't pay attention to the attorney general's hearing earlier today, because he walked through very clearly the rationale behind this program.

Q There is no rationale --

MR. MCCLELLAN: And Helen, I think you have to ask --

Q -- (inaudible) -- the law.

MR. MCCLELLAN: I think you have ask are we -- well, he's not -- are we a nation at war.

Q That's not the question.

MR. MCCLELLAN: No, that is the issue here.

Q The question is, the point is, there are means for him to go to -- get a warrant to spy on people.

MR. MCCLELLAN: Enemy surveillance is critical to waging and winning war. It's one of the traditional tools of war.

Q But he says he doesn't have running room --

MR. MCCLELLAN: The attorney general outlined very clearly today how previous administrations have used the same authority --

Q That doesn't make it legal.

MR. MCCLELLAN: -- and cited the same -- and cited the very same authority.

Q (Inaudible) -- they broke the law, that's too bad.

MR. MCCLELLAN: And we're going to continue doing everything we can --

Q You know what happened to Nixon when he broke the law.

MR. MCCLELLAN: -- within our power to protect the American people.

This is a very different circumstance, and you know that.

Q No, I don't.

The President was blunt. He said that he had authorized the NSA's domestic spying program, and he made a number of misleading arguments to defend himself. His words got rousing applause from Republicans, and even some Democrats.

The President was blunt, so I will be blunt: This program is breaking the law, and this President is breaking the law. Not only that, he is misleading the American people in his efforts to justify this program.

How is that worthy of applause? Since when do we celebrate our commander in chief for violating our most basic freedoms, and misleading the American people in the process? When did we start to stand up and cheer for breaking the law? In that moment at the State of the Union, I felt ashamed.

Congress has lost its way if we don't hold this President accountable for his actions.

The President suggests that anyone who criticizes his illegal wiretapping program doesn't understand the threat we face. But we do. Every single one of us is committed to stopping the terrorists who threaten us and our families.

Defeating the terrorists should be our top national priority, and we all agree that we need to wiretap them to do it. In fact, it would be irresponsible not to wiretap terrorists. But we have yet to see any reason why we have to trample the laws of the United States to do it. The President's decision that he can break the law says far more about his attitude toward the rule of law than it does about the laws themselves.

This goes way beyond party, and way beyond politics. What the President has done here is to break faith with the American people. In the State of the Union, he also said that "we must always be clear in our principles" to get support from friends and allies that we need to fight terrorism. So let's be clear about a basic American principle: When someone breaks the law, when someone misleads the public in an attempt to justify his actions, he needs to be held accountable. The President of the United States has broken the law. The President of the United States is trying to mislead the American people. And he needs to be held accountable.

Unfortunately, the President refuses to provide any details about this domestic spying program. Not even the full Intelligence committees know the details, and they were specifically set up to review classified information and oversee the intelligence activities of our government. Instead, the President says ­ "Trust me."

This is not the first time we've heard that. In the lead-up to the Iraq war, the Administration went on an offensive to get the American public, the Congress, and the international community to believe its theory that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction, and even that he had ties to Al Qaeda. The President painted a dire ­ and inaccurate ­ picture of Saddam Hussein's capability and intent, and we invaded Iraq on that basis. To make matters worse, the Administration misled the country about what it would take to stabilize and reconstruct Iraq after the conflict. We were led to believe that this was going to be a short endeavor, and that our troops would be home soon.

We all recall the President's "Mission Accomplished" banner on the aircraft carrier on May 1, 2003. In fact, the mission was not even close to being complete. More than 2100 total deaths have occurred after the President declared an end to major combat operations in May of 2003, and over 16,600 American troops have been wounded in Iraq. The President misled the American people and grossly miscalculated the true challenge of stabilizing and rebuilding Iraq.

In December, we found out that the President has authorized wiretaps of Americans without the court orders required by law. He says he is only wiretapping people with links to terrorists, but how do we know? We don't. The President is unwilling to let a neutral judge make sure that is the case. He will not submit this program to an independent branch of government to make sure he's not violating the rights of law-abiding Americans.

So I don't want to hear again that this Administration has shown it can be trusted. It hasn't. And that is exactly why the law requires a judge to review these wiretaps.

It is up to Congress to hold the President to account. We held a hearing on the domestic spying program in the Judiciary Committee yesterday, where Attorney General Gonzales was a witness. We expect there will be other hearings. That is a start, but it will take more than just hearings to get the job done.

We know that in part because the President's Attorney General has already shown a willingness to mislead the Congress.

Russell Feingold is the US senator from Wisconsin.

I know, $100,000 sounds like a lot of money for someone who'll be in the classroom for six work-weeks per year at the very most, but Myers will have other things to fill his time. The university notes that he'll also be "identifying potential speakers", "attending alumni and Foundation events," and "keeping some of his other options open." Nice work if you can get it.

Retiring to soft, lucrative jobs at colleges or think-tanks is, of course, nothing new for ex-government officials. But most often it seems to be the good people of the Washington, DC area, New York, or New England who shoulder the burden of supporting out-to-pasture, high-profile public servants. I guess it's time for those of us in Kansas to step up, do our part, and pay for the general's upkeep; however, we'd really like to know more about what our students, alumni, and taxpayers will be getting for the money.

KSU's president, to whom Myers will report directly, says, "His knowledge of foreign relations, presidential leadership and other topics as they relate to national security, international relations and military preparedness is invaluable." But if Myers is going to be teaching military history at a rate of several thousands dollars per lecture, we can only hope that his grasp of history and current events has improved since his days as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

Adjusting history to fit the future

General Myers became familiar to TV viewers via his Pentagon press conferences and Congressional hearings, usually playing straight man to the irrepressible defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

In those performances and other situations, Myers displayed a steadfast loyalty to the policies of the Bush Administration, regardless of how wildly they diverged from available facts or how quickly they bogged down and ruptured under the weight of political baggage. Such stout persistance in the face of reality may help an ex-military officer land a good job, but it's not generally regarded as the mark of a good history teacher.

Myers was the nation's top military officer through the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. During that period, his chief interest in history appeared to be in re-writing it.

For example, in December, 2001, with the Afghanistan campaign apparently going well, Myers told American Forces Press Service, "It is not just bin Laden we're after. [He] has handfuls of lieutenants we really want to go after ...We know who they are, they already have rewards on their heads, and we'll follow them wherever they go."

Later that same month, a US-Afghan attack on the Tora Bora region netted not a single al-Qaeda leader. Any who might have been in the area appeared to have escaped through a well-known mountain pass that was left unguarded. The following April, feeling no doubt that his pledge of December lay safely forgotten, Myers reassured Washington Post reporters that Tora Bora need not be considered a failure. "The goal there," he said, "was never after specific individuals."

That, along with his famous claim a few days later that "the goal has never been to get bin Laden," helped adjust history to the needs of the future and the coming invasion of Iraq.

"In history, there has never been a more humane campaign"

The following winter, during the buildup to the Iraq invasion, Myers responded to concerns over expected civilian casualties by providing this undeniable but less-than-enlightening observation about the nature of war: "People are going to die."

Military history students at KSU may want to know more than that about how invading armies should handle the issue of noncombatant deaths. Myers may want to describe for them one interesting preemptive strategy that he and Rumsfeld employed a month before the invasion: to blame the enemy for deaths caused by American weaponry.

In a Feb. 19, 2003 briefing, Myers said, "It is a violation of the law of armed conflict to use noncombatants as a means of shielding potential military targets--even those people who may volunteer for this purpose. Therefore if death or serious injury to a noncombatant resulted from these efforts, the individuals responsible for deploying any innocent civilians as human shields could be guilty of grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions."

In April, 2004, looking back over a year of war and occupation, Myers the historian told reporters, "I don't think there's ever in the history, the history of warfare, and warfare by its nature is not kind, it's cruel, it's very very cruel, make no mistake about it, but in the history of warfare, there has never been a more humane campaign than the one waged by coalition forces starting on March 19th of last year, and through today. And that goes for the operations in Fallujah."

By December 2005, Myers's "humane campaign" (featuring cluster bombs, white phosphorus, and other such gentle weapons) had, even by President Bush's own estimate, directly or indirectly caused a minimum 30,000 Iraqi civilian deaths. Relying on solid statistical analyses, the CounterPunch editors (in the print edition) have shown how the death toll is likely in the six figures, and perhaps as high as 500,000.

WMDs found: in Pentagon plans

Historians will have the task of sorting through the many and varied rationales that were used to justify the rush to war in Iraq. It will be interesting to see how Professor Myers deals with the question. Throughout the period, from the first drumbeats right up to the bitter end, Myers did his best to support the most prominent claim -- that Saddam Hussein had or was developing "weapons of mass destruction".

He even played a minor role in the Niger uranium drama. In February 2002, Marine Gen. Carlton W. Fulford Jr. went to Niger to check out charges that Saddam Hussein had tried to obtain uranium from that country. (This was around the same time that the CIA sent former ambassador Joseph Wilson on his more well-known mission to Niger.) Fulford, who "came away convinced the country's stocks were secure" submitted his report to Myers.

But, when the Niger scandal broke into the headlines in the summer of 2003, the Washington Post found the general to be of little help in sorting out the mess: "A spokesman for Myers said last night that the general has 'no recollection of the information' [i.e., Fulford's report] but did not doubt that it had been forwarded to him."

The Post went on to convey this deft double-negative explanation provided by Myers's spokesman: "Given the time frame of 16 months ago, information concerning Iraq not obtaining uranium from Niger would not have been as pressing as other subjects."

By the time the war got underway, however, Myers's interest in Iraqi weapons had intensified. In May 2003, after the Army's chief team assigned to search for WMDs -- the 75th Exploitation Task Force -- concluded its work without finding anything, Myers wasn't quite ready to give up on what had been the Bush administration's only effective pretext for the war. Seeming to undercut the conclusions drawn by his own team of experts, he asked, "Are they [WMDs] still perhaps out there somewhere in some sort of bunker?" They weren't.

A couple of weeks later, he was still keeping to the administration line: "Given time, given the number of prisoners now that we're interrogating, I'm confident that we're going to find weapons of mass destruction." But Myers turned out to be as poor a predictor of the future as he was an interpreter of the past.

Throughout that period when the White House and Pentagon were sounding the alarm over possible WMDs in Iraq, their officials, including Myers, were pushing the US not only to develop but to use a new generation of especially devastating WMDs -- so-called "bunker busting" nuclear weapons.

Myers told USA Today in July, 2003, "In terms of anthrax, it's said that gamma rays can ... destroy the anthrax spores, which is something we need to look at. And in chemical weapons, of course, the heat [of a nuclear blast] can destroy the chemical compounds and make them not develop that plume that conventional weapons might do, that would then drift and perhaps bring others in harm's way."

But, noted the paper, "Sidney Drell, a Stanford University physicist, determined that destroying a target dug 1,000 feet into rock would require a nuclear weapon with a yield of 100 kilotons--more than six times that of the Hiroshima bomb. The explosion of a nuclear bomb that big would launch enormous amounts of radioactive debris into the air and contaminate a huge area."

As a military historian, General Myers will probably know a good bit about what happened when we bombed Hiroshima, so he should be able to help his classes visualize what happens to people "in harm's way" when you drop a six-times-bigger bunker-buster.

Trying to keep torture chambers out of the history books

Seymour Hersh revealed in The New Yorker and his 2004 book Chain of Command that cruel treatment of prisoners by US troops in Afghanistan, Guantanamo, and Iraq had its origins in a secret Special Access Program. He wrote that a former intelligence official told him that "fewer than two hundred operatives and officials, including Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were 'completely read into the program.' The goal was to keep the operation protected. 'We're not going to read more people than necessary into our heart of darkness,' he said. 'The rules are Grab whom you must. Do what you want.' "

There is no evidence that Myers was concerned about the horrific results of that program until graphic evidence of abuse and torture started seeping into the public sphere. Even then, his main concern seemed to be in keeping the crimes under wraps and out of military history books. He tried to convince CBS's "60 Minutes II" not to reveal the infamous Abu Ghraib pictures to the US public, but managed only to delay their broadcast. (At that point, he claimed, he still had not read a " devastating" report by Major General Antonio M. Taguba on conditions at the prison and had not seen the photos.) He later went to court to stop the release of more such pictures.

Outraged last May at charges by Amnesty International that Guantanamo had become "The gulag of our time," Myers looked to another respected organization for cover, saying, "The ICRC [International Committee of the Red Cross] has been at Guantanamo since day one. It is essentially a model facility."

He somehow failed to mention that, in the words of a Los Angeles Times columnist, "The ICRC has consistently chastised the U.S. for keeping an unknown number of 'ghost detainees' hidden away from legally mandated monitoring, for its open-ended detentions at Guantanamo Bay, for its 'renditions' of detainees to states using torture and for its use of interrogation techniques that themselves border on torture."

"We're definitely winning"

Myers, more than most other officials, has repeatedly stressed that the war in Iraq will be long and bloody and difficult. Looking at historical precedents, he has warned that insurgencies typically last from 7 to 12 years.

But when optimism is called for, Myers can rise to the occasion.

In April of last year, commenting on an upsurge in insurgent attacks, Myers told reporters, "In terms of the number of incidents, it's right about where it was a year ago." But he added, incongruously, "Almost any indicator you look at, the trends are up. So we're definitely winning."

In July, with the the nation's military actions appearing to be headed in no particular direction and with public support in need of shoring up, Myers and Rumsfeld appeared to decide that a repackaged effort might sell better. Myers told the National Press Club that the term "war on terror" was now out: "If you call it a war, then you think of people in uniform as being the solution." He and Rumsfeld suggested an alternative term: "global struggle against violent extremism".

Being even more vague and clumsy than "war on terror", the appellation "global struggle against violent extremism" has not proven as durable and will likely be lost to history.

Even though the US goal "has never been to get bin Laden", the Pentagon has enthusiastically trumpeted the capture of anyone who could be fingered as one of his high-level associates. In September 2005, Myers's last month as Chairman, US and Iraqi troops killed Abu Azzam, whom Myers identified as the "number two al Qaeda operative in Iraq, next to Zarqawi." Newsweek magazine checked that claim with three US government counterterrorism officials, who said, no, Azzam was in no way Number Two.

Independent counterterrorism consultant Evan Kohlmann told Newsweek, "If I had a nickel for every No. 2 and No. 3 they've arrested or killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, I'd be a millionaire."

That same month, Myers and Rumsfeld emphatically asserted that the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan by US troops did not hamstring the military's efforts to help Hurricane Katrina's victims. But an exhaustive Wall Street Journal investigation showed that just the opposite was true.

As Myers's tenure as Chairman was coming to a close and the occupation of Iraq remained awash in blood, Myers's upbeat assessments and historical rewrites became too much even for Senator John McCain. In Myers's final appearance before a Congressional committee as Chairman, the pro-war Arizona Republican fumed, "General Myers seems to assume that things have gone well in Iraq. General Myers seems to assume that the American people, the support for our conflict there is not eroding."

McCain continued: "General Myers seems to assume that everything has gone fine and our declarations of victory, of which there have been many, have not had an impact on American public opinion. Things have not gone as we had planned or expected, nor as we were told by you, General Myers."

In the academic world, twelve hundred miles from the political pressures of Washington, General Myers may prove to be a good educator. But can he be ten to fifty times as good as other part-time instructors, in keeping with his salary? One thing is clear: Whatever he accomplishes at Kansas State University can never undo the devastation he supervised for four years as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Stan Cox is a plant breeder and writer in Salina, Kansas. He can be reached at t.stan@cox.net.

The reorganization was conducted largely in secret by a panel of four political appointees. A career expert was allowed to join the group only after most decisions had been made. Its work was overseen by Frederick Fleitz, a CIA officer who was detailed to the State Department as senior adviser to former Undersecretary of State John Bolton, a critic of arms agreements and international organizations.

Bolton's nomination to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations was nearly derailed last year by allegations that he'd harassed and bullied his staff. Some State Department weapons experts from offices that had clashed with Bolton were denied senior positions in the reorganization, even though they had superior qualifications, the officials and documents alleged.

Fleitz, who works for Robert Joseph, Bolton's successor, later telephoned State Department employees who signed a letter protesting the moves and registered his displeasure, one official said.

The political appointees who crafted the shakeup sought and received assurances from the State Department's legal and human resources offices that what they were doing was legal.

But other officials charge that it violated long-standing management and personnel practices.

"The process has been gravely flawed from the outset, and smacks plainly of a political vendetta against career Foreign Service and Civil Service (personnel) by political appointees," a group of employees told Undersecretary of State for Management Henrietta Fore on Dec. 9, according to notes prepared for the meeting.

A dozen State Department employees delivered a rare written dissent to Fore and W. Robert Pearson, the director general of the Foreign Service, on Oct. 11. Some also sought, but failed to get, a stay from the Justice Department to stop the plan.

Joseph, the undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, said in a telephone interview Tuesday that the changes might have been painful to some but were necessary.

"Reorganizations are never easy. They inevitably mean change," he said. "The reorganization ... was essential to better position us to further the president's strategy against WMD (weapons of mass destruction) proliferation and (Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's) emphasis on transformational diplomacy."

"Yet the reorganization also offers important new professional opportunities for the employees of the State Department," he said.

Much more than personnel disputes are at stake, said the officials who are critical of the changes.

They said they were concerned that Rice, who announced the changes last July but apparently hasn't been deeply involved in their execution, will be deprived of expertise on weapons matters. Among those who have left is the State Department's top authority on the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the cornerstone of the international regime to curb the spread of nuclear arms.

"We had a great group of people. They are highly knowledgeable experts," said former Assistant Secretary of State John Wolf, who frequently clashed with Bolton. "To the extent they now are leaving State Department employ, or U.S. government employ, it's a real loss to State Department. It's a real loss to the government."

A half-dozen current department officials expressed the same view, but spoke on condition of anonymity because, they said, they feared retaliation.

Jonathan Granoff, the director of the Global Security Institute, an arms control advocacy group, said the loss of State Department arms-control expertise was especially worrisome because the only mechanism for verifying U.S. and Russian nuclear arms cuts - the 1991 START I treaty - is due to expire in less than three years.

That also will eliminate the most effective way of verifying that the former rivals are abiding by their Non-Proliferation Treaty commitments to eliminate their nuclear arsenals eventually, he said. "Rather than nurture our experts, the administration seems to have brought in neophytes without a passion for progress in this field and, worse, undermined the international institutions that are most effective in stopping proliferation," he said.

More broadly, the clash is the culmination of a generation-old battle over arms control.

In one corner are specialists who argue that negotiated arms agreements help U.S. security; in the other are those who argue that the United States should rely mostly on the threat of force, sanctions and other unilateral steps to curb the spread of dangerous weapons and maintain a credible deterrent against an attack.

When she announced the reorganization, Rice declared that more than deterrence and arms control treaties are necessary to safeguard America. "We must also go on the offensive against outlaw scientists, black-market arms dealers and rogue state proliferators," she said.

Bush has demanded maximum presidential flexibility on national security matters, avoiding major new arms treaties and pushing the limits of executive power on issues from domestic eavesdropping to the treatment of terrorism suspects.

Many career government experts didn't dispute the need to reorganize U.S. policy offices that deal with weapons of mass destruction. But they said they worried that future administrations with a view different from Bush and Rice's would have to build the expertise they'd need from scratch.

An inquiry by Knight Ridder has found evidence that the reorganization was highly politicized and devastated morale:

-Thomas Lehrman, a political appointee who heads the new office of Weapons of Mass Destruction Terrorism, advertised outside the State Department to fill jobs in his office. In an e-mail to universities and research centers, a copy of which was obtained by Knight Ridder, he listed loyalty to Bush and Rice's priorities as a qualification.

Lehrman reportedly recalled the e-mail after it was pointed out that such loyalty tests are improper.

-Specialists in the department's old Nonproliferation Bureau, which frequently battled Bolton on policy toward Iraq, Iran and North Korea, largely were frozen out of important jobs when offices in that bureau merged with those in another.

"Bolton had blood in his eyes for the Nonproliferation Bureau," said another official who's still working at the State Department.

One of the government's top experts on the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency, which helps stem the spread of nuclear weapons but disputed the Bush administration's claims about Iraq's weapons programs, returned from two and a half years at IAEA headquarters in Vienna, Austria, and was blocked from assuming an office directorship that had been offered to him, the officials and a complaint document said.

The post, which oversees U.S. diplomacy regarding international efforts to contain suspected nuclear-weapons programs such as those in Iran and North Korea, went to a more junior officer who numerous officials said shared Bolton's views.

Five higher-ranking officers were passed over, the document says, adding that none had negative work histories "aside from intimations that they were not as `trusted' politically by the political management level."

In August 2005, the officer chosen for the job sent an e-mail sarcastically titled: "A Nobel for the IAEA? Please." The agency and its director general, Mohamed ElBaradei, were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October.

-None of the most senior posts in the new organization was filled by a woman, although several highly qualified female candidates were available.

-The effort was at odds with the recommendations of four December 2004 reports by the department's inspector general, also obtained by Knight Ridder.

The reports praised the nonproliferation unit as "having remained center stage following the events of September 11, 2001." The unit it merged with, the Arms Control bureau, was described as "largely in search of work."

A third unit overseen by Bolton - and now Joseph - which deals with overseeing compliance with arms treaties, was recommended for downsizing. Instead, it's been expanded.

Mark Fitzpatrick, a veteran nonproliferation expert who recently left the State Department, said he was worried about what he called an "exodus" of qualified specialists from the department.

"It seems about a dozen or so have left since the merger came about, many out of frustration," said Fitzpatrick, who's now at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. "I'm concerned that the ability of the merged bureaus to provide to Condoleezza Rice the same kind of high-quality advice they provided Colin Powell on the very dire proliferation issues facing the world will be diminished by the exodus."

The American Foreign Service Association, which represents foreign service officers, wrote to Rice on Nov. 28, citing allegations that political considerations drove the reorganization.

Dissidents had a second meeting last month with Fore, the undersecretary of state for management.

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Key arms-control issues since President Bush took office:

The Bush administration's arms control policies began with a refusal to submit a global treaty to ban underground nuclear-test blasts indefinitely for Senate ratification.

The administration withdrew the United States from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and blocked international efforts to conclude a pact on verifying compliance with a global biological-weapons ban.

The administration also rejected a mechanism for verifying that the United States and Russia are adhering to a 2002 accord to cut deployed nuclear warheads, has embraced new uses for nuclear arms and is spending billions modernizing and improving the U.S. arsenal.