To its critics, the Bush administration post-9/11 responses were anything but carefully calibrated or constitutionally sound. The charge list is invariably a long one: from warrantless wiretapping and the monitoring of international banking transactions by the National Security Agency, through military tribunals, the use of presidential ‘signing statements’ and the invocation of executive privilege at home to instances of prisoner abuse, coercive interrogation and extraordinary renditions abroad, the administration strained not only every sinew to wage its war on terror but also stretched the meaning of the US Constitution to breaking point. If America had finally revealed its imperial pretensions after September 11, then the president had likewise emerged as a more imperial figure in his studied neglect of constitutional convention and barely concealed contempt for international law.