Book Review: Oklahoma City by Andrew Gumbel and Roger G. Charles.

I preface this review by freely admitting that I have known Roger Charles for about 16 years, ever since I got pulled into the private investigation of J.D. Cash and the Wilburn family of the Oklahoma City bombing. Roger is a retired LTC of Marines and an absolute indefatigable resource on the bombing, PATCON and other federal law enforcement and military scandals. No one, and I mean NO ONE possesses a more encyclopedic knowledge of the unanswered questions and federal arcana of the mystery wrapped in an enigma of the FBI's curious actions to distance the bombing, first from Elohim City and secondly from the FBI and its operation PATCON.

Thus, it is hard to believe that only a filtered version of Roger's decades-long fact gathering seems to have made it into this supposed "definitive treatment" by his co-author, Andrew Gumbel. It is apparent that Gumbel did all the writing with Roger just credited (and barely at times) with the research. It seems that the publisher is only providing Gumbel for the press campaign, although Charles is doing his best to do his own press interviews on local radio shows. The differences between the two are striking. Gumbel does his best to finesse some of the revelations in this book by ascribing any errors to incompetence, agency and inter-agency dysfunction and even seems to believe two of the most notorious liars in the case -- Kirk Lyons, Andreas Strassmeier, etc. He even manages to ignore facts that I'm certain Roger (who benefits from the papers of our co-worker in the private investigation, the late J.D. Cash) must have brought these facts up. Gumbel has simply ignored items like PATCON or the satellite surveillance of Elohim City, something that could not have happened without the approval of the National Command Authority. Nor does it mention the considerable cover-up input of people like Eric Holder or Janet Napolitano. (Items that the interviews I have heard of Roger since the book came out he, unlike Gumbel, is not shy of mentioning.)

Gumbel does mention me, without naming me, and the successful militia poster campaign to embarrass the DOJ into arresting Michael Brescia, referring to me as "an Alabama militia leader" in one spare mention and a footnote. Gumbel treats this as an incidental, not the motivating factor in persuading DOJ to get Brescia off the street (and to void the reward for John Doe II).

The book is worth-while in that it brings up many inconsistencies of the FBI's story and investigation, but it is evident that whatever contract Roger signed with the author and publisher did not give him much of an input into the final product. The definitive work on the Oklahoma City bombing has yet to be written.