WASHINGTON - Turning up the political heat on Iraq, the Bush administration said yesterday that Baghdad is so completely in cahoots with al-Qaida that it has harbored top aides to Osama bin Laden and may have trained the terrorists in germ and gas warfare.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the United States has evidence that senior members of al-Qaida have been in Baghdad "in recent periods," but they did not include bin Laden. It's unclear whether they remain in the Iraqi capital, he said, because they are "moving targets."

Rumsfeld said he had high confidence in this information, but he acknowledged that the intelligence reporting is based on different types of sources of "varying degrees of reliability." He said some of the information came from suspected al-Qaida members in U.S. detention.

Iraq denies it supports al-Qaida.

"We have what we believe to be credible information that Iraq and al-Qaida have discussed safe haven opportunities in Iraq (and) reciprocal nonaggression discussions," Rumsfeld told a Pentagon news conference.

He cited "solid evidence" of al-Qaida members in Baghdad, but at one point he refrained from explicitly stating they had received a government-sanctioned grant of safe haven. That, he said, "happens to be a piece of intelligence that either we don't have or we don't want to talk about."

Just a day earlier, when asked during a news conference in Poland about alleged links between al-Qaida and Iraq, Rumsfeld would say nothing except to assert that such links exist. He said yesterday that he was at liberty to elaborate because some intelligence had been declassified.

The White House joined in throwing accusations at Iraq that appeared designed to bolster its argument that Iraq poses such a grave danger that Saddam Hussein must be deposed, by force if necessary.

"Al-Qaida and Iraq are too close for comfort," White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said.

Rumsfeld and the Pentagon's top military officers met yesterday at the White House with President Bush to discuss a range of issues, including Iraq. The officers included the chiefs of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines as well as the chairman and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Yesterday's statements, which echoed those made previously by national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, are the strongest yet alleging Iraqi complicity with al-Qaida. Previously, evidence of the two working together was tenuous, or came from what U.S. officials called unreliable sources.

Rumsfeld said "senior level contacts" between al-Qaida and Iraq go back a decade and have been increasing since 1998. In that year the Iraqi ambassador to Turkey traveled to Afghanistan to meet with senior al-Qaida leaders, another U.S. official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.