A number of recent press reports suggest that the Obama administration may be on the point of backtracking from commitments given earlier.
President Obama is on the verge of breaking two key campaign promises in his troubled attempt to shut Guantánamo Bay - with plans to revive the military tribunal system set up by George Bush and to continue the indefinite detention of up to 100 inmates.
The moves, which have not yet been signed off by Mr Obama but look increasingly likely, are a result of his promise on his second day in office to shut the Guantánamo Bay prison within a year.
Since then, officials charged with working out how to shut down the prison concede that up to 100 of the 241 detainees remaining are either too dangerous to release or cannot be tried in a military or civilian court. The evidence against many of them is tainted because they were tortured, or involves sensitive issues of national security that cannot be revealed.
The latest Administration thinking has been decried by human rights groups who point out that as a presidential candidate, Mr Obama called the military tribunal system an enormous failure and condemned the indefinite detention of detainees as a gross breach of the US Constitution.
In addition to his pledge to shut Guantánamo, Mr Obama ordered a 120-day suspension of the military tribunal system, pending a review. Officials say that they now want a three-month extension, and have indicated that the hearings are likely to be restarted, with some modifications.
On the campaign trail, Mr Obama criticised the military tribunals because they drastically reduced the rights of defendants, with hearsay evidence permitted and even testimony produced under the harsh interrogation techniques the new Administration says amounted to torture.
Now Mr Obama's lawyers are worried that they will struggle to try many detainees in federal court because a civilian judge could throw out much of the evidence, allowing allegedly dangerous men to walk free. Plans being worked on are to modify the tribunal system to increase the rights of defendants, but without giving them the full protections provided by the American legal system.
A cynic might say of this that it looks as if the tribunal system is being adapted to yield verdicts already thought to be the 'correct' ones. It is perfectly fair to point out that this problem comes down to Barack Obama courtesy of the policies of the Bush administration. At the same time, if Obama should decide there are people currently being held who - it is already somehow known - cannot be given the benefits of due process, then that will be a retreat from his 'reject[ing] as false the choice between our safety and our ideals'. (See also these reports, and part 2 of the post here.)