Addressing the American people on May 24, US President George W. Bush admitted that "disgraceful conduct by a few American troops" had dishonored the US, but he seemed not to recognize its disastrous effect on the whole Iraq war effort. The publication of the pictures of the Iraqi detainees in the Abu Ghraib jail run by the Pentagon – described by defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld as ‘blatantly sadistic, cruel and inhumane’ – is likely to prove the tipping point in the Iraq War and its aftermath. With Iraq’s supposed links to Al Qaida and its possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) already discredited, the pictures of humiliated, naked prisoners stripped away Bush's last public justification for his invasion of Iraq,