In 2011, the fifty-year old threat by President John F. Kennedy to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds"

took a dramatic step towards realisation on this day in the Supreme Court of the United States with the presentation of legal arguments in Kennedy versus the Central Intelligence Agency.Final Insurance

The origination of the case was the publication of Conspiracies, Cover-ups & Crimes by Jonathan Vankin (© 1996):

"As early as 1952, the CIA was discussing how knock off key guys and make it look like natural causes, declassified CIA memos have revealed. Heart attacks and cancer are preferred methods. CIA director William Casey developed a brain tumour just as he was supposed to make public his knowledge of the Iran-Contra Affair. Nelson Rockefeller suffered a heart attack in flagrante delecto with his secretary. Two assassination plots against Gerald Ford would have made Rockefeller president, but they both failed. Once Rocky was no longer useful, he turned up dead.

Suicides are also popular, as are one-car accidents. Kennedy haters have no trouble envisioning a heavy-handed Kennedy-engineered conspiracy behind Chappaquidick and the death of Mary Jo Kopechne. Other theorists take the same anomalous facts - unusual dents in the car, time lapses in Ted Kennedy's memory - to mean that Kennedy and Kopechne were victims: he drugged, she murdered. Chappaquick was final insurance that a Kennedy brother would not be president".

The release of the so-called Pentagon Papers II during the first year of the the Obama Administration declassified a large number of CIA memos from the period 1969 - 1988. Fresh evidence of malfeasance emerged not only to link the Agency to Chappaquidick, but also to draw suspicious paralells between William Casey and Ted Kennedy's brain tumours.

Shortly afterwards, the junior United States Senator from New York, Caroline Kennedy - herself a law graduate from Columbia Law School - announced her intention to pursue litigation on behalf of the Kennedy family. Another graduate of Columbia, President Barack Obama signalled his commitment to limit Agency activity to the terms of its 1947 Charter in line with the recommendations of the Church Committee, Rockefeller Commission and Pike Committee.