From today’s Democracy Now!, a point worth hearing because it gets lost when people see Fahrenheit 9/11 which exclusively focuses on Bush family ties to Saudi Arabia. The following passage is from the transcript of the third segment, 29 minutes 31 seconds into the show.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to As’ad AbuKhalil, Professor at California State University, Stanislaus. Can you talk about the Bush family and their relationship with Fahd and the whole family in Saudi Arabia?

AS’AD ABUKHALIL: You see, this is one area where I am in dissent to some of the left wing coverage here in America about the Bush and the El-Saud family, as in Michael Moore’s movie. I take the view that it is well beyond the Bush family. This is not a family connection. This is a connection between this oppressive family in Saudi Arabia and successive U.S. administrations since the days of F.D.R. Why should we single out the Bush family, for example, and not the self-designated human rights president, like Jimmy Carter, who was as fawning around King Fahd as was any other president.

This is something that is beyond familial connection. It is one that entails a relationship that covered not only coordination about the pricing and the production of oil, but we should also remember so many covert operations that now we realize were so foolish and so deadly and dangerous to world peace and security. When we speak about the legacy of this man, we have to say that he was without a doubt quite close at some point to the bin Laden family and to Osama bin Laden, like everybody else in the senior members of the Royal Family, met with him, coordinated with him, and they cultivated ties with the kind of fanatical groups in Afghanistan that produced the likes of Zarqawi and al Qaeda. And they did so, we should always remember, with close association with the United States.

But there is something also being left here. This is a man that is also responsible for the menace of Saddam Hussein. For much of the 1970s and 1980s, this guy, King Fahd himself, was somebody who sputtered something in Saddam Hussein and arranged for a very wide Arab governmental financial support in order to arm and finance the adventures of Saddam Hussein and his deadly invasion of Iran back in 1980. Because he miscalculated assuming that he was going to take over the entire Iranian state and end the export of revolution, so to speak, and the result, he was the one who financed this cultivation of the personality cult of Saddam, which was responsible for the kind of Napoleonic complexes that triggered all these adventures and even invasion of Kuwait later on.