COLONEL FLETCHER PROUTY, 1989, Chief of Special Operations at the Pentagon, 1960-1963

When there is an assassination you have to have a lone nut because a lone nut can kill somebody for no reason.  If you admit that three or four people were involved or that there was, to use an overworked term, conspiracy, then you have to say  you had a reason.  Well, they don't ever want to face that reason. . . . none of these cases really get into the courts, and when they do they're very abnormal cases.  --COLONEL FLETCHER PROUTY, 1989, Chief of Special Operations at the Pentagon, 1960-1963

Thank you to Mike Rivero at What Really Happened, time-stamped on July 21, 09:20.

When there is an assassination you have to have a lone nut because a lone nut can kill somebody for no reason.  If you admit that three or four people were involved or that there was, to use an overworked term, conspiracy then you have to say had a reason.  Well, they don't ever want to face that reason.  What was the reason why Kennedy was killed?  What was the reason why King was killed? By having a lone nut, you don't have to ask that question.  I think all of us have studied assassinations ought to forget some names totally.  One name is Oswald.  Another one is Sirhan. Another one is Ray.  Forget 'em.  Those poor guys were staged into this program; they had nothing to do with the assassination except be the fall guy.  And as an assassination studier, a student of assassination for 25 years, I tell you, frankly, I could write the whole book on assassinations without using any one of those names.  They're not relevant, other than as patsies. You see none of these cases really get into the courts, and when they do they're very abnormal cases.  Consider the case in Los Angeles about the killing of Kennedy in 1968.  The people most proximate to Kennedy at the time he was killed have never been questioned yet.  I traveled to another country to talk to a young lady that was almost leaning on Bobby Kennedy at the time he was shot.  She can tell you how he was killed.  But the courts have never talked to her.. this cover-up pattern is enormous and it's very effective.  It closes everything down.

01:37  What's the technique for an assassin once the assassination has been completed, where do they go?  How do they operate? 

01:47. Obviously, the first thing is to bring in the hitman or the hit men.  It's usually a triangulation affair so that you're sure you have the guns to do the job.  You can't always say where your victim is going to be, so you place the guns in the right place and you're ready for it.  But that's the easy part.  Then you have to get them out of there. I think if you study as we have hundreds and hundreds of photographs of these scenes, you'll find that there were certain people, for instance, that didn't run from the area, stood there casually, nothing happened.  They have the assurance they're going to be picked up at the proper time and removed from the area.  Now undoubtedly, they're the killers.  They're too smart to run and draw attention to it.  They're too smart to jump in a car that speeds away.  If there is a car that speeds away, that's a cover story.  It's like the white Mustang: it's not the one that really did the job.  And the press releases that are immediately put out lead you to the man in a sixth floor window while the man that really did the killing is right down there on the street waiting for somebody to pick him up casually and walk off.  Just consider either of the Kennedy cases, or the King case.  The thing you notice most is that the police stood with her hands down and did nothing.  There were no on the spot detectives.  There was nobody really looking into the ballistics.  There was no one checking any of the things that the police would have gotten into in the first place.  So there's where you begin to see the cover-up pattern.  Somebody has told the police department stay away from this.  Now, they don't tell them that way.  They say "Look, because this was Mr. King in town, we have a special group of secret service, or special group of whatever, here," and so the police think, "Well, it's covered.  We're not needed," but in any event they are away.  Now, in Dallas, I know for a fact myself that there was an army unit we intended to use in Dallas for protection on the streets to watch everything.  The commander of that Army unit had received a call, a very simple call, saying "We don't need your unit."  He knows there are other units so he thinks I'm going to use somebody else's unit.  The next day he found out there were no units there, well it's too late then you see.