Baudrillard had written controversially about the first Gulf War in the early 1990s. In 2004 when the news of US military torture in Iraq broke his views on the scandalous images of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, originally published in French, were eagerly awaited. His brief ‘war porn’ article, translated into English by Chris Turner, was published in the first issue of a new academic journal in the theoretical humanities and social sciences called Cultural Politics published by Berg in 2005, including on its editorial board Baudrillard's compatriot Paul Virilio. Although Baudrillard's very brief contribution is certainly not ‘academic’ or ‘political’ in any conventional sense, it is a fascinating cultural reflection on the immediate impact of the obscene acts at Abu Ghraib with allusions to Albert Jarry's Pére Ubu figure as well as his own earlier work on the images of the destruction of the Twin Towers in 2001. The extract here is Turner's masterly translation. Baudrillard had seemingly been enervated by the 9/11 events and the boost to his thesis about symbolic exchange and the counter-gift and the end of the ‘event strike’ at the beginning of the twenty-first century. He had already written about the US and its allies responding to the 9/11 ‘terrorist’ by ‘bombing him to smithereens or locking him up like a dog at Guantanamo’. But his constant question was ‘who can thwart the global system?’