What Happened To the Good Ol’ Days When They’d Just Cover It Up? David Rose has, in a recent Vanity Fair article, revealed confidential documents that describe a covert effort by President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Elliot Abrams to arm Fatah forces and thus touch off the Palestinian Civil War of 2006 (1). The article is not shockingly new, as Bush’s “Action Plan” was already leaked to the Jordanian press, and merely confirms a previous report by UN envoy Alvaro de Soto that placed the blame for the war on the US. Dubbed “Iran Contra v. 2”, the endeavor is another member in the club of disastrous US covert operations. Yet, the otherwise well argued and reported article does not answer the real question posed by the discovery. It is not “Why the hell did they do it?”— several decades of Middle Eastern policy easily explain that. It is the much more difficult, and for that reason all the more important question: “Why the hell didn’t they just cover it up?” This is an Administration that has turned secrecy into an art form and has created an imperial presidency not seen since the heyday of the Nixon Administration. The shock of the entire piece is how the conspiracy itself was so shoddily concealed. Confidential reports were “conveniently forgotten” and ex-officials spoke out with relative ease. The State Department does not even have the common decency to vehemently deny the whole affair and merely “declines to comment.”