We have seen already how the US and UK executives shaped a narrative of difference and dangerousness that both captured popular fear and panic about Al Qaeda and ratcheted it up to create a politico-legal space within which repressive counter-terrorist detention law and policy could be implemented. In both cases international human rights law was part of that narrative, represented either as inapplicable (by the US) or as permitting the behaviour or, if not, as being in need of reform (by the UK). This engagement with international human rights law was not, I submit, an accidental or even a marginal one. Rather it was the relationship through which an attempt to project panic through the hegemon of the US and the UK could take place with the ultimate aim of transforming international legal standards into the shape desired by either or both states. It was, in other words, the precursor for what we might call a classical exercise in power politics in international law and, furthermore, it was one that we might – if we were convinced by classical neo-realist descriptions of international law – have thought would be successful. The ‘true story’ of the right to be free from arbitrary detention and its safeguarding right to challenge the lawfulness of one's detention is messier and less categorical than this narrative might have expected. Rather than bend entirely to the will of the hegemon, international human rights law has shown a significant degree of normative resilience to these projections of panic.