The picture of a man hanging naked and upside down naked from a bunk which is alleged to be one of 2,000 images that President Barack Obama tried to block publication of fearing a backlash against U.S. troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan
Former president George W. Bush warned his successor: the realities of governing would put to the test Barack Obama's commitment to break with his predecessor's counter-terrorism practices.
Obama's aides insist that he has not reneged on that promise.
But recent decisions like the one this week to fight the release of photographs documenting mistreatment of detainees by US soldiers in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere shows how hard it has been for Obama to escape the Bush legacy.
A few days before leaving office, Bush explained that he had taken certain decisions without allowing himself to be swayed by "the loud voices" of public opinion.
"President-elect Obama will find this, too," he predicted. "He'll get in the Oval Office and there will be a lot of people that are real critical and harsh, and he'll be disappointed at times by the tone of the rhetoric.
"And he's going to have to do what he thinks is right," Bush said.
Two days after his swearing-in, Obama did what he thought was right, ordering the closure of the "war on terror" prison at Guantanamo and forbidding the use of Bush-era interrogation methods that critics charged were nothing less than torture.
But since then, the Obama presidency has been been haunted by the ghosts of the Bush presidency.
With his decision to challenge a court ruling ordering the Pentagon to release hundreds of photographs gathered in prisoner abuse investigations, Obama's new era of transparency and the rule of law has been put into question.
The political left, which rallied behind Obama as their champion against Bush's "global war on terrorism," is beginning to have doubts.
Republicans, meanwhile, have found their voice and are using the same arguments that Democrats had used against them to great effect.
An ally of the left, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, found herself trying explain what she knew about the CIA interrogations and when she knew it.
The American Civil Liberties Union openly accused the Obama administration this week of adopting "the stonewalling tactics and opaque policies of the Bush administration" in refusing to release the photographs.
The disappointment on the left was all the greater because the Obama administration had said it would make the photos public. But that changed after US military commanders raised their concerns at the highest levels of the government.
"The role of the president in this situation is as commander-in-chief," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said. It is a title that Bush often invoked to justify his most controversial decisions.
Obama's "positions on transparency and public disclosure are strong and well known," David Axelrod, one of the president's closest advisers, said in an interview with PBS television. "But ... they're not without limit."
The administration's release in April of secret Bush-era memos that provided the legal rationale for the CIA's controversial interrogation methods had already caused an uproar.
The left reproached Obama for opposing criminal investigations of lawyers and senior Bush administration officials who authorized the interrogation techniques.
The right accused Obama of giving terrorists an advantage. Former vice president Dick Cheney resurfaced to demand the release of other memos that he said would show the interrogations produced valuable intelligence.
Ironically, Obama's decision to stop the release of the abuse photos drew praise from his political opponents.
Meanwhile, another controversy brewed over the special military commissions set up during the Bush administration to try some terrorist suspects.
"If you have any doubt about where we stand on the issues of detainee abuse, enhanced interrogation techniques and torture, I'd be happy to provide you the copy of the executive order that once and for all ends their use as part of this administration," Gibbs told reporters Thursday.
An unnamed Obama administration official said late Thursday that the government is set to announce that it will retain Bush-era military commissions to try top terror suspects, but with improved legal safeguards for detainees.
Obama halted the Guantanamo Bay military tribunals pending a review soon after taking office in January, saying that the system as it stood did not work, but did not rule out the use of a modified tribunal system in future.
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