United States Senator for Hawaii from 1963 until his death in 2012, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and the third of the three senators named in Imminent as having funded AAWSAP with Senator Harry Reid and Senator Ted Stevens.
Why the trio matters more than any of them individually
Reid is the name attached to the programme in public, but an appropriation of this kind needs the chairman and the ranking member of the committee that writes the number, which is what Inouye and Stevens supplied. The programme’s critics and its defenders agree on the mechanism and disagree only about whether it was proper: the money moved into the DIA through the normal defence appropriations process, with no separate authorisation and no public description.
Inouye had a long record on intelligence oversight, including service on the Church-era and Iran-Contra committees, which makes his participation the more interesting and is the part of the story neither side develops.
Connections
AAWSAP · Senator Harry Reid · Senator Ted Stevens · DIA · Imminent · Church Committee · Black Budget