Sept. 11 chair defines Iraq, Qaeda contact

''Al Qaeda didn't like to get involved with states, unless they were living there. They got involved with Sudan, they got involved . . . where they lived, but otherwise, no," he told ABC's ''This Week."

Kean said a commission staff document is an interim report, and ''we don't see any serious conflicts" with what the administration is saying.

That report, released last week, said there were contacts between Osama bin Laden's network and the Iraqi government, but they did not appear to have produced a collaborative relationship.

''I find it, frankly, shocking that the exaggerations of the administration before the war relative to that connection continue to this day," Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, said on CNN's ''Late Edition."

Commissioner John Lehman, a Republican, came to the defense of Vice President Dick Cheney, who is the most aggressive in contending that there were strong Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda.

Lehman said new intelligence that ''we are now in the process of getting" indicates one of Hussein's Fedayeen fighters, a lieutenant colonel, was a prominent Al Qaeda member.

Cheney has said he probably has intelligence the commission does not have, and ''the vice president was right when he said that," Lehman said on NBC's ''Meet the Press."

Lehman said the news media were ''outrageously irresponsible" to portray the staff report as contradicting what the administration said.

The commission's vice chairman, former representative Lee Hamilton, Democrat of Indiana, said the White House and the commission agree on the central point: There is no evidence of a collaborative relationship between Al Qaeda and Iraq in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, on the United States.

Among the differences between what the White House has asserted and what the commission says it has found are:

Cheney said Iraq deployed a bomb-making expert, a brigadier general in the Iraqi intelligence service, when bin Laden asked for terror training. President Bush said on Feb. 8, 2003, that Iraq had provided Al Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons training.