The Abu Ghraib photographs are the first digital images to be counted among the most celebrated icons of our time. This article is dedicated to the first reception of these images. In the context of the contested veracity of digital imagery, it is striking to observe that this corpus was immediately accepted as reliable. The cornerstone of the photographs' credibility was in fact the military criminal case, which also provided the conditions of their transmission to the press. The Abu Ghraib photographs provide an ideal case study to analyse the effects of the new economy of digital images. The disappearance of the photographs' value is one of the key factors of the production of these pictures, as a threshold effect typical of the contemporary state of digital photography. Furthermore, the Abu Ghraib case contradicts all the Cassandra predictions of a decline in our sensibility to the language of images and negates the forecasts according to which the digital photography era would render the recording process unreliable. It also goes to prove that the digital image belongs to the history of photography.