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A. The short answer is no. We know we have done some damage. We've had weather problems over the past three days. As a matter of fact, as I looked at a picture just before I came down here, all of southern Iraq, all of Kuwait and the northern part of Saudi Arabia are heavily covered by clouds. We've had a lot of fog problem. We are fighting the bomb damage assessment problem as hard as we can. And the minute that we get better information and I'm authorized to release it, or someone is authorized to release it, we will. We do know that we have done damage; we can't tell completely the extent of that damage. A. No. We knew that the weather was going to be a problem this time of the year in that area of operations. As the Secretary I think said this morning, we knew there'd be some clear days, and we knew there'd be some cloudy days. We had two or three cloudy days in a row, which is limiting our ability to measure completely the effect of what we have done. But we have allocated a lot of sorties, they have flown and they have delivered their ordnance, and we think they've had an effect. We don't know exactly what that effect is yet. It has not had an impact on the conduct of the campaign so far. Likelihood of Ground War A. Well, we can't completely assess the damage. We've had weather problems, as I said. We can make some assessments of the damage. What I mean with the 80 percent is that the sorties are launched, they go to their target, they successfully drop their ordnance. And that's what we're saying the success rate of the sortie is. Now, the bomb damage assessment is a different thing. BRIEFING BY WILLIAMS

\"The air campaign has been very, very effective and will continue for a while,\" Mr. [Bush] said at a brief appearance in the White House Rose Garden. Repeating his vow that he, not President Saddam Hussein of Iraq, would dictate the pace of the war, he said, \"We are going to take whatever time is necessary to sort out when a next stage might begin.\" Overlap Is Possible During his Rose Garden appearance, Mr. Bush made a special point of addressing that issue. \"I would be remiss,\" he said, \"if I didn't assure the American people that this war is being fought with high technology. There is no targeting of civilians.\" Mr. Bush also said Mr. [Dick Cheney] and General [Colin L. Powell] were \"very reassuring in terms of the morale of our people over there.\" He continued: \"They know why they're there. They are gung-ho about it. They know its importance, they know that it's right and just, and so I have great confidence in them, and altogether I feel much better after this briefing.\"

\"We said yesterday that we didn't know there were civilians\" in the building, the White House spokesman, Marlin Fitzwater, said. \"I don't see any reason to go through all this again. The data and the information have not changed, nor have our conclusions.\" \"We were as careful as we possibly could be,\" General [Thomas Kelly] said. \"We didn't know civilians were in there. We struck it. We suffer remorse as a result of that.\" \"We think we've been very careful in the past,\" he said. \"We missed this one. This one might have been an intentional thing -- in my own opinion it was,\" he said, suggesting that Iraqi authorities might have sent civilians to the building in anticipation that it could be bombed and would become a propaganda cause for Iraq.

Diplomats and experts on the region differed over the significance of the spreading violence. A Western ambassador in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, said it \"marks the beginning of the end for Hussein.\" But a Saudi expert said it amounted only to \"the turbulent backlash of war, which he'll put down in a week or so.\" Hojatolislam Mohammed Bakr al-Hakim, head of the Supreme Assembly of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a Shiite Muslim organization based in Teheran, said at a news conference in the Iranian capital that rebels had captured the cities of Nasiriya, Samawa, Kut, Diwaniya and Amara, and that a Republican Guard regiment had surrendered in Amara. All the cities are southeast of Baghdad in the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, the Shiite heartland in Iraq. 'Casualties Are High' An ancient settlement, [Basra] has long been a hotbed of Shiite opposition to Mr. Hussein. The city was severely damaged in the Iran-Iraq war, leaving many of its citizens disaffected from Mr. Hussein's Government, and the same thing has happened in the gulf war. In addition, it is awash with bitter soldiers, who are doubtless spreading stories of the armed forces' humiliation, the heavy casualties suffered during the fighting, and the large number of prisoners of war taken by the allies.

Allied forces braced today for what Defense Secretary Dick Cheney termed \"one of the largest land assaults of modern times\" as artillery and ground clashes along the Saudi border with Iraq and Iraqi-occupied Kuwait grew larger and more heated. Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the American commander, was said by pool correspondents with the American First Armored Division to have severely criticized the latest \"friendly fire\" incident. He said in a memo, according to the reports, that he feared many more such incidents would occur once the land battle was joined. Low-Level Targets Criticized \"You use a fly-swatter on a fly,\" Colonel [James Riley] told his subordinates. \"You save your best ammo for the appropriate targets.\"

The decision to give refuge to Iraqi planes may be an extension of Teheran's effort to play both sides of the gulf conflict, Administration officials and experts on Iran said. The Government officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Iran's actions were consistent with its practice of publicly criticizing Iraq's military aggression but apparently assisting Mr. [Saddam Hussein] at the margins of the crisis. 'Flower of the Air Force' The Pentagon first confirmed the flight of Iraqi planes into Iran on Saturday, and the number of fleeing planes has risen fast in recent days. General Kelly described the fleeing Iraqi planes today as the \"flower of the air force.\" Eighty planes would represent about 10 percent of the Iraqi Air Force, Western officials believe. Iranian support to Iraq would be a serious setback to American and allied efforts to keep Iraq isolated during the war. Secretary of State James A. Baker 3d has asserted that Washington has received assurances from Teheran that Iran will remain neutral in the conflict and that the Iraqi planes will not be permitted to leave. Pentagon officials said there was as yet no evidence that Iraqi planes that have flown to Iran have returned to Iraq. Pentagon's Mixed Feelings

\"I can tell you I got about 1,000 letters, and 95 percent of the people said 'We feel we're being told everything we need to know.' \" He added later, \"None of those letters was supportive of the press.\" \"I think the press needs to take a step back and reflect on how they cover things,\" General Kelly said, adding that in World War II, \"the security of the force was absolutely accepted by all those correspondents covering the war, including Ernie Pyle.\" He chose the Army in a last-minute diversion from a career in journalism, in which he holds a bachelor of science degree from Temple University. \"I come from a newspaper family,\" he said in an interview today. \"My father, my grandfather, my uncle and my mother all worked at The Philadelphia Inquirer.\"

If I could now turn into the Task Force Bayonet area in the central section, the narrowest zone there. Task Force Bayonet consisted of a Mechanized battalion, the force of the 6th Mechanized. It also was supported by a platoon of light tanks as well as the 5th battalion of the 87th Infantry. And the mission of Task Force Bayonet was twofold really: to provide security for our major facilities in the Task Force Bayonet area of operations and the principal combat mission performed by the Mechanized battalion was to seize the Comandancia [ map, 7 ] , the headquarters of the P.D.F., General [Noriega]'s headquarters, and that was also done beginning at about 1 in the morning. Beginning 55 minutes after H-hour, or about 1:55 this morning, the first element of the 82d Airborne Division Ready Brigade arrived, 10 C-141's, and they conducted a parachute assault onto the international airfield in that vicinity. Ten C-141's arrived several hours later and at 0515 the second half of the 82d Airborne Division parachuted in. And their mission is sort of depicted by the arrows. They will move, one arrow going out to make sure Battalion 2000 stays where it is. Two other arrows coming back into the direction of the city to assist with stability operations and make sure the First Infantry Company and the Cavalry Squadron you see depicted, remain neutralized. In order to continue our stability operations and to make sure we really accomplish our mission of protecting Americans and assisting the newly inaugurated government, additional forces are being brought down from Fort Ord, California, the 7th Infantry division, a brigade, and as I mentioned earlier, the 16th M.P. brigade will be sending additional elements down. We'll skip Task Force Bayonet now and go out to what we're calling Task Force Pacific, and that's the one that's built around the 82nd Airborne Brigade, which jumped in last night. They have gotten organized, moved out. They have attacked the Cav squadron at Panama, Viejo, or engaged the cavalry squadron, and reduced it; there is no longer any resistance there. They have engaged the infantry company at Finajitas and reduced it; there is no resistance there. They have engaged the Battalion 2000, another anti-coup unit from the 3d of October, and found nothing when they got there. Actually an R&S team out along the bridge on the Pacora River last night called in airplanes, AC-130's, and they knocked out nine of their vehicles, which I think is a pretty good portion of their vehicles. And the rest fled.