Plus the expansion of power and side stepping of normal legal process by the executive branch became normalized under the George Bush administration which was well documented by one of his top White House lawyers, which he well documented in the book ‘The Terror Presidency’ and who later started the excellent Lawfare blog.

https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Side-Inside-Terror-American/dp/0...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Goldsmith

https://www.lawfareblog.com/

This included a big expansion of the black budget agencies and their power since it was the one thing the exec has strong control over and little public blowback because of the secret courts and classified nature.

Good point. The cables only provide evidence that the US government captured and tortured this one particular innocent guy in Europe using their network of black sites, European prisons, and secret prisoner transportation networks. There's a ton of circumstantial evidence that they in fact used this infrastructure to kidnap and torture a whole bunch of other innocent people, but the current batch of cables doesn't prove that by itself.

I highly recommend Jane Mayer's book The Dark Side for putting together all the public information we have on the black sites and the prisoner transport network though: http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Side-Inside-Terror-American/dp/03...