The NYT Editorial Board, May 30, 2012, on Obama’s assassination-by-drone program:

A unilateral campaign of death is untenable. To provide real assurance, President Obama should publish clear guidelines for targeting to be carried out by nonpoliticians, making assassination truly a last resort, and allow an outside court to review the evidence before placing Americans on a kill list. And it should release the legal briefs upon which the targeted killing was based.

The NYT Editorial Board, October 27, 2012, in its endorsement of Obama for a second term:

In the broadest terms, he introduced a measure of military restraint after the Bush years and helped repair America’s badly damaged reputation in many countries from the low levels to which it had sunk by 2008.

Not only has Obama refused to make any of the Office of Legal Counsel justifications for the assassination-by-drone campaign public, he’s repeatedly refused Congressional requests that he do so. And while Obama did withdraw American combat forces from Iraq, he did so under duress–at the hands of an Iraqi parliament that refused to agree to an extension of the American combat presense in their nation. Moreover, Obama has embraced the effectively unfettered use of covert action and Special Operations Forces to conduct air strikes and other forms of “kinetic actions” in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and elswhere in South Asia and east Africa.

These are facts and they have appeared repeatedly in the pages of the NYT–in both news stories and editorials. The leadership of the media behemoth that gave us the Pentagon Papers case has succumed to a form of editorial schizophrenia where President Obama’s misconduct in office is concerned.