07/27/16 – James Ostrowski – The Scott Horton Show

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Introducing Jim Ostrowski.
He is a regular writer for lourockwell.com and a lawyer from Buffalo, New York.
And he's the author of Progressivism, a primer on the idea of destroying America, political class dismissed, essays against politics, government schools are bad for your kids, and a couple of others.
But the latest, brand new out, co-authored with his brother Michael Ostrowski, the impeachment of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for high crimes in Syria and Libya.
Brand new out at amazon.com.
Welcome back to the show, Jim.
How are you?
Real good.
It's always great to be on your show, Scott.
Very happy to have you here.
And very happy to read this book.
I'm a little bit jealous because I'm writing about Libya and Syria too, only I'm taking a long time to do it.
And I write on deadline for a living.
So yeah, there you go.
And I really wanted to, I wanted to crank this out, obviously unlikely that anybody's going to be impeached.
But there is a presidential race going on.
And I think that the book raises a lot of important issues that people should be concerned about.
Yeah.
Well, now if they're typical Republicans and they think, well, I don't know really what you're talking about.
I mean, obviously they ought to be both impeached and imprisoned over Benghazi.
But what do you mean about Libya in general, Jim?
Well, I mean, Benghazi, obviously there's a lot of personal vitriol with respect to Hillary.
And that's the topic for like three other shows.
But what is she being accused of with Benghazi?
The negligent, I guess, negligent supervision of a compound and there was a sort of a temporary consulate there.
But the point is, and the book is that there was an illegal invasion launched with the assistance of the United States and Clinton and Obama were the prime movers.
So if you're concerned about Benghazi, there is no Benghazi without the war.
One falls from the other.
So the real crime is launching an illegal war.
And it's unfortunate that Americans were killed in Benghazi, but it was a direct consequence of the illegal war.
And that was intentional, not negligent, as I understand the case about.
And I understand, oh, you know, allegedly she lied about the thing after the fact.
But before the fact, I guess she's accused of negligence, but or extreme negligence.
But in any event, the going into the war, that's intentional.
So, you know, as a criminal lawyer, there's a big difference between an intentional wrongdoing, which is what our book alleges, in fact, what happened, and negligence, as in the Benghazi case.
Yeah.
But, you know, I think both houses of Congress passed the United Nations Participation Act back in 1946 and or was it 47 and 46.
So therefore, the UN Security Council said it was legal to start the war.
They did.
Well, they called it a no fly zone.
But anyway.
And so even if you disagree with the war, Jim, wouldn't you have to concede that it was as legal as can be?
How could you impeach Obama or Hillary for starting a war that the UN said they could?
Well, let me take the easy answer to that, which is that they went went beyond the resolution.
They were supposed to protect protect civilians, and they only protected the civilians on one side and allowed the civilians on Gaddafi's side to be slaughtered.
And they they very quickly eliminated Gaddafi as an offensive force, but continued their efforts in order to overthrow his regime.
So even if that resolution authorized their initial activities, they went beyond it and therefore violated the law.
But that that any any time we go through the UN, you still have to go back to Congress and get authority for the specific war.
And that that argument is addressed in the book.
Yeah.
Well, and the bait and switch on the United Nations resolution.
I mean, well, I don't know.
What does the law say about that?
Because it certainly was.
They said, look, we it's a no fly zone because we're going to prevent Gaddafi from using his air power in Benghazi, even though they were really threatening that his army was rolling to Benghazi was going to kill every man, woman and child there, which we can talk about that, you know, ridiculous claim in a second.
But, yeah, well, you know, I mean, the resolution that, say, Russia and China, the two more reluctant members of the UN Security Council voted for said you can have a no fly zone to protect the civilians of Benghazi.
And yet we know that almost instantly.
And as you guys explain in the book, this changed to regime change in Tripoli.
But I mean, yeah.
Is that really illegal?
It's like declaring war on Japan, but then attacking Korea or is it something else?
Well, we think it's illegal and in a number of different ways.
But again, I think the easiest case to make is that they went beyond the UN resolution.
So let's assume for the sake of argument is authorized.
They went beyond it in many ways, including providing arms illegally to the to the rebels, which was absolutely forbidden.
So this was not an authorized war and it had horrible consequences.
Obviously, we can we can get into that.
But Libya is now a basket case that's in a state of chaos.
It's been turned over to whatever, you know, we can argue about terminology, but fairly radical people and a lot of old scores have been settled, which is what usually happens.
One of the points you make in the book is when, you know, when you go in and upset the apple cart in one of these one of these countries, the result is very, very often worse than the original status quo, which which nobody really in these parts preferred.
But to go in there knowing that you're going to make things worse is really just part of the indictment here.
It's really something to think of back to 2011 when and I don't even know, I guess I assume that this is credible.
I've never heard it debunked anyway, that it was Gaddafi had a role in the bombing of a German disco in Berlin where some American soldiers were killed.
And Ronald Reagan bombed him for a couple of days, killed his adopted daughter and some other things.
But he didn't invade the country.
He didn't say we're going to overthrow Gaddafi now.
Now here we were.
He hadn't attacked us.
He hadn't done anything to us, hadn't bombed our soldiers in a disco or anything like that.
And we're going to go ahead and, you know, quadruple what Ronald Reagan did, I guess, just because the Soviets, you know, aren't there to push back in any way or something like that.
But it was kind of amazing at the time that there was so little pushback that, wow, Obama's going to go this much further than Ronald Reagan ever would when it came to regime change in Tripoli.
But they just went ahead.
Well, I think it gets into another interesting issue is that like, what do you remember the anti-war movement under Bush?
You probably have.
Barely now.
You probably have had numerous shows on this.
But I distinctly recall there was the woman in black protesting, the silent protesters, the usual suspects out there protesting under Bush.
And then when Obama came in, it all kind of fizzled and you bring this up to people and they say, well, yeah, we did have a rally three years ago and there were 14 people there.
So you're wrong, Ostrowski and Horton.
But really, the Democrats get a pass on all this stuff.
But I remember, it's funny, just Googling this issue, I found out that I hammered Obama on Syria like three years ago.
And I just recall being very incensed that we went into, I don't know why Syria bothered me more than Libya.
I was probably on trial or something during Libya.
I just remember being incensed.
What are we doing?
We're going into a place, this guy didn't do 9-11, Assad, didn't know much about him.
Obviously a strongman dictator, that's about all I knew.
But why are we going in there?
Why is the U.S. going in there?
And sure enough, it turned out to be a disaster in both countries.
And there has to be a price to pay, if not impeachment, then something.
Or at the minimum, an opportunity to go in and learn from this stuff, because we're going to have a new president, one party or another, and maybe a third party.
And really, I'm hoping that all three of these, Hillary obviously is going to read the book, but I really do hope that Trump and Gary Johnson read the book, and maybe learn something from it so we don't do this stuff again.
It would be nice if Hillary at least heard of the thing.
Not that it would really dissuade her, I don't think she can be dissuaded, but...
No, well that's the whole part of it, the whole syndrome of progressivism.
One of the things that is going on in the book, for your readers who may have read Progressivism, which is selling very well, and I appreciate your support on that, I know it was on your show for that, but one of the things that goes on in the book is that we apply, Mike and I apply the theory of progressivism to foreign policy.
And when I was writing Progressivism, there is a lot in there about war and foreign policy, but the more you dig into things, and I find this with cases too, you'll have a civil litigation that goes on three or four years, and it's almost by year three or four and now you kind of understand it better, because you've just been thinking about it and working through the problem, but progressivism applied to foreign policy, which I really think Syria and Libya are worth, is even worse than domestic policy, and that's an issue that's explored in the book, but the reason, real simple, is that in domestic policy you have elections and legal procedures, and in Syria, basically, you have violent intervention and war.
So progressivism in foreign policy is even worse than the domestic variety, which we obviously see with the Great Society and the failure of numerous domestic programs, but people die when progressives get busy overseas.
Well, and then as you say in the book too, they can never admit that it was a mistake to do anything, only to not do enough.
So Hillary, in the debate with Bernie Sanders, said, you know, okay, I guess you're right that Libya's a disaster, but one, it's all Obama's fault, all I did was tell him to do it, but he's the one who's the president, and two, don't worry, when I'm president, we'll reinvade and we'll stay in Libya forever, like we have bases in Germany, Korea, and Japan, and we'll just stay in North Africa and we'll make North Africa better that way.
Absolutely, and again, one of the things that, one of the reasons I wrote Progressivism is that there didn't seem to be a really detailed sort of checklist of what progressivism really means, and one of the elements of progressivism, as you say, is that they can never admit that progressivism is wrong, it's always that not enough government force was used, and there's a beautiful quote by Obama where he literally, and it's in the book, he literally says, we gotta go in with more force next time.
It's like, I mean, you could just say Lyndon Johnson, if he had survived the CES program, he'd say, well, you know what?
That Marvel Cities program would have worked if we'd just spent a couple more billion dollars, and so there is this progressive mindset, which beyond the highly unlikely situation of impeaching these people, is really more the point of the book to teach people what mental, what philosophical errors our politicians are making that have us in such a mess right now all over the world.
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Well, we should make sure and attack the right, too, because, you know, the Pentagon, of course, clicked their heels and carried out the war, and the Republican Party, and especially other leadership and right-wing talk radio, they love the war, and not because they're progressive so much.
I mean, in a sense, and I know we talked about these kind of shifty definitions a little bit when we talked about your book, but there's plenty of right-wing conservative nationalism and imperialism here, which is just as horrible and destructive, although at least, and this isn't a rationalization, but I guess kind of on the face of it, imperialism is based on at least an attempt to be rational and exploit for your own interests, whereas when it comes to bringing democracy to Libya, we're so far in the clouds here that, you know, it becomes, right, it's not a matter of succeed or fail.
It's always just a work in progress, right?
You know if you succeeded or failed in seizing the oil fields, but if Tripoli doesn't have a parliamentary democracy and a monopoly on, you know, the land between Egypt and Algeria yet, well, then we just got to keep working on it.
Well, it's a wonderful situation.
They now have several governments over there, and it's working out very well, but as far as Bush, you know, back in the day, you and I hammered Bush really hard.
He is hammered in the book.
Somebody just on Facebook said, what about Bush?
They said, actually two people have said that in the last couple of days.
What about Bush?
And they said, he's not the president.
We want to impeach a ghost?
He's down in wherever he is, Houston or Texas, doing whatever he does.
He's painting pictures or whatever.
But you got to, you know, impeachment has to do with people who are in office or in the case of Hillary, granted it's a rather novel theory, impeaching her if she becomes president based on prior acts, which I think is a perfectly valid theory.
Others disagree, but ultimately it's up to Congress to determine what's impeachable under the Constitution.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, for example, like during the impeachment of Bill Clinton for the perjury, if NBC News had not sat on the interview and withheld the interview of Juanita Broderick explaining how Bill Clinton savagely raped her and bit her on the face in 1978, when he was the attorney general of Arkansas, he may have been convicted of the perjury charge just because of the Juanita Broderick thing.
And in fact, I think all of the Republican senators who actually went and read her testimony voted to convict and they didn't really give a damn what the charge was anymore.
They were convicting him for raping that lady back in 78 because Juanita Broderick was so believable.
And, you know, certainly that was a crime that Bill had committed long before he became the president.
But yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, well.
And it's funny, too, is if they had if the liberals hadn't resisted that and if the liberals had said, you know, he did break the law when he committed felony perjury in front of that grand jury, then Al Gore would have been the incumbent president or pseudo kind of incumbent in 2000.
It would have beat Bush handily.
We would have never had the George W. Bush years whatsoever.
Well, we again, there's a lot going on in the book that maybe the title doesn't give away.
There isn't a short, compact discussion of impeachment in American history.
We do talk about Clinton and Nixon and think that the listenership should realize that as a lawyer, I oppose the impeachment of Clinton.
I'm not one of these sort of right wing guys who screams impeachment every time something happens that I don't like.
Leaving the Broderick thing aside, because that wasn't the charge.
I didn't think that Clinton should have been impeached.
And I said so at the time.
I didn't write it up, but I guess I told the Trump I told everybody.
But no, impeachment should be reserved for very serious things.
And I think starting illegal wars, which, you know, that's why we have the Nuremberg Tribunal, which is actually discussed in the book.
One of the one of the charges that Nuremberg was fighting an aggressive war.
Well, you know, when your country's not attacked and you're not about to be attacked and you launch a war, well, that that's an aggressive war.
So this is a very these are serious charges.
But just let me address.
Well, let me go back to let me go back one second, though.
I mean, first of all, because the U.N. Security Council resolution, you know, legally speaking, overrides that says perfectly fine to start a war as long as you can get France, Russia and China to agree with you on the Security Council to do it.
Right.
But then also want to go back to the Broderick thing real quick.
What if there had been a tape?
What if it had come out that it was a proven fact that Bill Clinton had savagely raped Juanita Broderick and bit her on the face back in 1978?
Would that have been.
Could you impeach a president for that or you would have to come up with a different charge?
No, I I agree with the thrust of what you're saying, but let's let's because I'm actually making the comparison to Hillary starting a war in 2011 and being impeached for it in 2018.
I, I agree with you.
But let's let's take it to an extreme.
Let's say that, you know, back in the 50s, somebody ran for president and it was found out that for whatever historical quirk of a reason, that person had had assisted with the Nazi concentration camps and was a war criminal.
Is anybody going to seriously say, oh, wait a second, you can't impeach somebody for for anything they did outside of their official duties after they were elected.
So I, I think that's absurd.
I think you can if it if it has to be serious.
It has to be proven.
But I agree with you.
I agree with you.
And certainly when it's like you said, it would be up to Congress to decide.
So it would be a political decision, right?
It wouldn't really be a legal one.
It would be a political.
Well, let me just say that they, it's a term of art, they call it a political question.
And to the non lawyers, what that means is that the Supreme Court will not review it.
They view it as totally the prerogative of the Congress under the Constitution.
And it's one of those areas where Congress determines the constitutionality of its own act.
And those are rare, but they're called political questions.
So to the answer, can the Congress do this?
Absolutely.
They can.
And they should.
Will they?
Highly unlikely, but as we point out in the book, a lot of things are highly unlikely and then they end up, they end up happening.
And I know there's a lot of there's a lot of anger at Hillary over the emails and over over Benghazi, but those people who feel that way should should should try to find a more legitimate mechanism for redress.
And I think that's one of the functions of our book.
We provide a legitimate avenue for redress and you can go to your congressional representatives.
It's the house, obviously, as we learned in school, hopefully they initiate impeachment.
So I would urge people to, after they've looked at the book, go to your Congress people and ask them to file a bill asking for an investigation of this matter.
All our book is doing is that technically is asking for the House committee to be formed to investigate.
Well, it is a very moderate approach, frankly.
Yeah.
You know, I think it's a real good one, too.
I really hope that, you know, some Republicans and right leaning people take your advice on this, because, you know, the Benghazi thing, to me, I agree with you is, you know, yeah, some negligence and some after the fact, you know, BS and about the video and this and that.
But it's it's such a narrow question compared to the whole Libya war.
When, as we've seen in it, as you guys show in your book, there's plenty of ammunition from the right, from the CIA, from the military, from even the leaders of AFRICOM who were against this war.
There's so much material there.
If the Republicans want to go after Clinton and have a bunch of military men up there testifying and saying we, you know, attempted and Obama, too, for that matter, we attempted to notify them that there was no impending massacre in Benghazi, that it wasn't really true that we were negotiating with Gaddafi.
We could have worked it out.
That's the stuff that we know from, you know, a few reports here and there in the press.
But we've never seen that discussion in front of Congress.
Well, there's so much more, I think, that needs to come out.
I mean, Mike Ostrowski and Jim Ostrowski are citizens and researchers and writers.
We have our day jobs and we have made, I think, a good prima facie case.
But there's so much more that needs to come out.
And you know how these things work.
The stuff that we don't know is always worse than what we do know, because that's why they covered it up.
So an investigation is absolutely necessary here.
Yeah, absolutely.
You're right about that.
And listen, I really think that you guys are going to get a big bang out of this book.
And especially because and you know, this is there are actually two Horton laws now.
One of them, one of them is that politicians will always keep all of his bad promises and none of the good ones.
And the other one is the best way to make a libertarian out of somebody is attack the right from the right and the left from the left.
And what you guys do here is you attack, even though Obama and Hillary are, you know, presumably Democrats.
And I know you frame this as progressivism, which it is certainly a part of it.
At the same time, you're you're not even really addressing the right wingers directly.
You're indirectly telling right wingers that, yeah, the best things to hate about Obama and Hillary are their terrible wars.
And then you're giving them great ammunition for that.
And that is a really great way to persuade conservatives that I'm tired of these reckless wars all the time.
Wait, what did I just say?
Oh, yeah, I guess I am.
Well, you know, libertarians like to tell conservatives war is just another failed government program.
Yeah, absolutely.
So and and this book just really does that in spades.
You know, the best case for prosecuting Hillary, it isn't some email scandal, pal.
It's arming jihadists in Syria.
How do you like that?
Let's have a real fight.
You know, absolutely.
It's like forget about Hillary's damn emails.
And by the way, just let me interject that again.
I'm I'm a lawyer for 32 years and I'm I'm a real lawyer.
I'm, you know, not one of these politicians who says I'm a lawyer.
I'm in the courts all the time.
Criminal, civil, federal court.
I do a variety of pretty serious litigation.
And I was I've been telling everybody for months Hillary is not going to be indicted over the email.
And I couldn't I said, let me tell you exactly what they're going to say.
And I told them and that's what the FBI director said.
So, you know, if you're really what is more, what is worse, the negligent, the negligent supervision of email servers or war crimes starting aggressive wars that have impact on the daily news, as we talk about in the book, in which are really obvious.
The refugee crisis arises out of the rise of ISIS.
ISIS existed, true.
And there were other factors of Bush and Bush's war, obviously.
But the ISIS wasn't anywhere near the factor it was until these two illegal wars were launched.
And for reasons we explain in the book.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I've read the whole thing and it's great.
And I really hope everybody will read it and pass it around and give it to your right wing cranky uncle with the email list and send it to your local AM talk radio show host.
And let's go after Obama and Hillary for their wars.
I think it's really great.
Some good first two chapters summarize how we got into this mess over the last hundred years.
But keep in mind, it's, you know, everybody's busy now, you know, paying the taxes and complying with the regulations.
So the book is short, it's readable, it's price to sell.
But the first two chapters start in about 1914 and explain how we got into this mess even before these two illegal wars.
Yeah.
All right.
There you go, everybody.
It's Jim Ostrowski.
He and his brother, Michael, have written this great book, The Impeachment of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for High Crimes in Syria and in Libya.
As he said, it's cheap.
It's 11 bucks at Amazon dot com.
It's a paperback.
It's only, what, like 150 pages, 175 or so?
It's really, really under a hundred pages.
Oh, is it under a hundred even?
Yeah, it's short, but it's like a lot of my books, it's dense, it's packed with good stuff.
Oh, yeah, it is good.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's not overly brief, but it's it's short enough that everyone will enjoy reading it and and passing it on.
So great work, Jim.
Thank you for coming back on the show.
Thanks, Scott.
I really appreciate it.
Yeah, me too.
OK, hey, seriously, guys, read this one.
Pass it around, especially to your right wing folks.
OK.
The Impeachment of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for High Crimes in Syria and in Libya.
It's available now at Amazon dot com by Michael Ostrowski and James Ostrowski.
And you can always read Jim.
He writes over at LewRockwell.com.
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