ABSTRACT
The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 portrayed by government officials as an assault on American values and civilisation have provoked an abandonment of the very values that supposedly inform a civilised way of life. The US administration has betrayed the cause of the protection of basic human rights and fundamental freedoms in the name of national security and counterterrorism. The starkest, most graphic illustration of this is manifest in the images which have become emblematic of America’s response to their war on terrorism: those broadcast in the dehumanised images of shackled, hooded, caged men in Guantanamo Bay and the trophy photographs of pyramids of naked men, publicly humiliated and abused at Abu Ghraib.
