We begin today’s show in Syria, where Israeli F-15 bomber jets have reportedly bombed a Syrian air base used by Iranian forces. There are reports that 14 people died in the strikes, including Iranian nationals. Israel is said to have launched the raid from Lebanon’s airspace. The Israeli bombing came a day after a suspected chemical weapons attack killed at least 60 people and wounded more than 1,000 in the Syrian town of Douma, the last rebel-held town in Eastern Ghouta. The Syrian opposition blamed the Assad government for carrying out the attacks, but Syria denied having any role. The chemical attack came one day after Syrian forces launched an air and ground assault on Douma. While international officials are still investigating what happened, President Trump took to Twitter to directly accuse Russian President Vladimir Putin of playing a role. The U.N. Security Council is meeting today to discuss the crisis in Syria. Today also marks John Bolton’s first day as President Trump’s national security adviser. We get reaction from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, one of the founding editors of The Intercept.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We begin today’s show in Syria, where Israeli F-15 bomber jets have reportedly bombed a Syrian air base used by Iranian forces. There are reports 14 people died in the strikes, including Iranian nationals. Israel is said to have launched the raid from Lebanon’s airspace. The bombing came a day after a suspected chemical weapons attack killed at least 60 people and wounded more than a thousand in the Syrian town of Douma, the last rebel-held town in Eastern Ghouta. The Syrian opposition blamed the Assad government for carrying out the attacks, but Syria denied having any role. The chemical attack came one day after Syrian forces launched an air raid and ground assault on Douma.

AMY GOODMAN: While international officials are still investigating what happened, President Trump took to Twitter to directly accuse Russian President Vladimir Putin of playing a role. He wrote, quote, “President Putin, Russia and Iran are responsible for backing Animal Assad.” Trump went on to warn there would be a “Big price…to pay.” The U.N. Security Council is meeting today to discuss the crisis in Syria. The U.S. U.N. ambassador, Nikki Haley, has called for an independent investigation of the chemical weapons attack. Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., today, today marks John Bolton’s first day as President Trump’s national security adviser.

We head now to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where we’re joined by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, one of the founding editors of The Intercept. Later in the broadcast, we’ll talk with Glenn about the latest in Brazil, the jailing of Lula, the killings in Gaza. But first, to Syria.

Can you talk about the latest in Syria, Glenn, the chemical weapons attack, President Trump blaming the attack on Assad, the, quote, “Animal Assad,” and, I believe, naming in a tweet Putin for the first time?

GLENN GREENWALD: So, obviously, the use of chemical weapons in any instance is horrific. It’s a war crime. It’s heinous. And it ought to be strongly condemned by everybody. I think that it’s—the evidence is quite overwhelming that the perpetrators of this chemical weapons attack, as well as previous ones, is the Assad government, although, in war, there are always lots of reasons to doubt, and we certainly shouldn’t run off and make hasty decisions, until there’s a real investigation, to make the evidence available.

I think the more important question at the moment is: What is the actual solution? Obviously, what’s happening in Syria is and long has been a horrific humanitarian crisis, filled with war crimes committed by pretty much every actor there. The Assad government has killed more people than any other. But the question is: What solutions do you think are viable? Do you think that having Israel fly fighter jets over Syria and bomb whoever they decide is their enemy is something that’s really going to help the humanitarian crisis? As Israel slaughters innocent Gazan protesters and uses snipers to end the lives of journalists who are wearing press jackets, do you really think that Netanyahu is going to help the situation in Syria? Do you think that Donald Trump is going to be able to command a military action that is going to do any good for the people of Syria? Does anyone think that that would be the goal of Trump’s military action or the role of the United States government revving up its war machine, that would end up helping the Syrians?

I think we ought to have learned the lesson by now that when we cheer for military action by Western governments in the Middle East, because we’ve been emotionally manipulated to be angry about some genuinely horrific act, it doesn’t end up doing anything other than making us feel good, and it usually ends up making the situation worse. So I think it’s possible and necessary to express moral outrage at the chemical weapons attack and other attacks on Syrian civilians, while at the same time remaining sober and rational and careful about how we allow our emotions to be funneled and channeled in order to try and come up with solutions. And I think we ought to have extreme amounts of skepticism over the idea that Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu or NATO powers are going to intervene in Syria in a way that’s going to be good in any way for Syrian civilians.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Glenn, this chemical attack, and also the Israeli bombing, comes only a few days after an unusual summit was held in Ankara between President Putin and the leaders of Turkey and Iran over the situation in Syria. And obviously, the United States was conspicuously absent from that kind of a summit. I’m wondering your sense of all of these larger powers battling over what happens in Syria.

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, this is the problem with the debate over Syria, which is there are two sides that try and simplify it. And it’s polarized and divided many political factions, probably the principal one being the left, where there’s these really two competing, simplistic narratives, which is, on one hand, Assad is the only war criminal in Syria, that he’s the singular problem and that removing him will solve everything, and then, on the other side, the idea being that Assad is the only thing standing in between al-Qaeda and ISIS and other religious fanatics taking over Syria, slaughtering minorities, like Alawites and others, when the reality is that it has long, for many years now, been a proxy war between all kinds of powers, including Russia, Iran, the United States, Saudi Arabia and many others.

And so, what’s happening in Syria is always incredibly complicated. And the tendency to try and simplify it is a way to impose this moral narrative on it that makes solutions really easy. “Hey, just let’s go bomb Assad out of existence,” sort of the way we tried to do with Saddam Hussein in Iraq. There are a lot of differences between Iraq and Syria, but there are lessons to be learned from every war, including the one in Iraq, or in Afghanistan or in other places around the Middle East in which the United States and its allies have intervened in the name of humanitarianism, that teach pretty clearly that the situation only gets worse, not better, the more Western powers intervene.

And I think that’s the principle that we need to start with, especially given that any military action from the United States would be led by a person named Donald Trump. He’s the commander-in-chief of the armed forces of the United States. And so, it’s really been bizarre, over the last 48 to 72 hours, watching these two competing themes emerge, that, on one hand, Donald Trump is this mentally unstable, morally unfit monster who has dementia and an attention span of a 3-year-old and is completely amoral, and then, on the other hand, this idea that the United States ought to essentially restart a new kind of war in Syria, led by that very same individual, Donald Trump. Whatever you think about Syria, does anybody believe that Benjamin Netanyahu, working with Donald Trump, is going to do anything other than make the situation infinitely worse on all levels?

AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Democratic Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland, who called for an international response to the Syrian regime’s alleged use of chemical weapons on its own people Saturday. Cardin was interviewed by Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan.

SEN. BEN CARDIN: There needs to be an international response. This is against international norms and—

MARGARET BRENNAN: A military one?

SEN. BEN CARDIN: Well, first and foremost, President Assad needs to be held accountable for his war crimes. Senator Rubio—

MARGARET BRENNAN: He hasn’t been, in the seven years of this war.

SEN. BEN CARDIN: Well, Senator Rubio and I have introduced legislation—it’s passed our committee—that would hold the evidence accountable. We need to make sure that there is a proceeding started by the international community to hold him responsible. This is not the first use of chemical weapons. Secondly, Congress passed very strong sanctions against both Russia and Iran. The Syrian regime, under President Assad, cannot exist without Russia’s support and the activities of Iran. The United States, the international community need to take action against Russia and Iran for what they’re doing in Syria.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Democratic Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Glenn. If you can respond to that, and also then move into John Bolton today, first day as national security adviser? Interestingly, back in, what, 2013, at the time of the sarin attack in Syria, where I believe the U.S. said something like 1,400 people were killed, among them more than 400 children, Bolton was on Fox and said, “I think if I were a member of Congress, I would vote against an authorization to use force here. I don’t think it is in America’s interest. I don’t think we should, in effect, take sides in the Syrian conflict.” This was during the Obama years. But if you could respond to both?

GLENN GREENWALD: So I think it illustrates this immense irony, and also this really important and often undernoticed shift in American politics. So you have Benjamin Cardin saying “Marco Rubio and I,” Marco Rubio being one of the most pro-war, militaristic neocons in the entire United States Congress, wanting to go to war with everybody, having spent eight years accusing Obama of being weak against every U.S. adversary because he didn’t bomb enough, even though Obama bombed eight countries. So you have Marco Rubio and Benjamin Cardin, who is probably the single greatest loyalist to AIPAC in the United States Senate, maybe competing with a couple of other Republican and Democratic senators, but very high up on the list, saying, “Marco Rubio and I, Benjamin Cardin, the loyalist of AIPAC, demand that the United States government and the international community do something about Assad, do something against Russia.”

On the other hand, you have Democrats who revere Barack Obama. And what did Barack Obama do during the eight years of his presidency when it came to what was happening in Syria, or the last five or six years since the civil war in Syria began? Obama took exactly the opposite position. He said, “We’re not going to get involved in Syria. We’re not going to devote efforts to regime change.” The CIA, under Obama, did spend roughly a billion dollars a year to arm and train Syrian rebels, but nowhere near enough to actually overthrow Assad, just enough to keep the war going, because Obama was very afraid of confronting Russia in Syria, and also of the chaos that would ensue if Assad were removed. That was Barack Obama’s position. He allowed for Assad to remain in power, even after he had threatened to remove him if he crossed the red line of using chemical weapons, which Assad then crossed.

So you have this very kind of ideologically mixed debate. It doesn’t follow along traditional right-and-left lines. You have people on the right—Donald Trump, when he ran, repeatedly said the U.S. has no interest in deciding who runs Syria, that it’s not the U.S.’s business, that the U.S. can’t afford to do it, that the U.S. isn’t going to make the situation better. And you have people on the left, as well, who are saying that the West should stay out of Syria. And then you have these kind of like militarists in both parties who are itching always for a new war and see this as an opportunity to start one. Obviously, Israel wants Assad gone. The neocons in the United States want Assad gone. And so, that’s really the shift, the debate, that has emerged.

And the question is: Do you think that the neocon, militaristic foreign policy of the Democrats and the Republicans over the last 15 years, when it comes to the Middle East, has produced good or bad results? If you think it’s produced good results, you should be cheering Ben Cardin and Marco Rubio, demanding that Donald Trump bomb Assad out of existence and confront the Russians. If you think that Obama’s foreign policy was better, as I do, in this case, which was avoiding confrontation with the Russians, not trying to think the U.S. can control Syria through military action, then you ought to be opposing this kind of war drum that is now being beaten again that would lead to Donald Trump getting involved in Syria.

As far as Bolton is concerned, obviously, Bolton is a sociopath. He’s one of the most dangerous foreign policy advisers and officials of the last 15 years. People in the Bush administration who served with him and who served with people like Dick Cheney and John Yoo and Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz—actual sociopathic maniacs, as well—have said that John Bolton was probably the most unstable and dangerous person in the Bush administration. And now he’s about to move into—or he has moved into an extremely influential position, advising Trump in the White House on matters of national security. But again, it is true that there is a big movement on the right and on the left to oppose U.S. intervention in Syria, on the grounds that it’s not in the U.S. interest to try and control what’s happening in Syria. We’ll see where Bolton falls on that. I mean, one of Bolton’s primary dreams in life is to go to war with Iran. And so, opposing Assad is one way to achieve that. He’s also a loyalist to Israel, and Israel seems to want Assad gone. So it’s very dangerous right now, given who’s in power and this pro-war orthodoxy that is arising almost automatically in Washington, given how high the stakes are and how inflammatory that situation is.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Glenn, John Bolton clearly does not need a Senate confirmation for his post, but there is a Senate confirmation hearing this week regarding Mike Pompeo’s move from CIA director to secretary of state. Your sense of the impact of the Pompeo nomination in terms of foreign policy, and specifically in terms of the Middle East?

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, Mike Pompeo is pretty much, and long has been, a standard, traditional House Republican, under the Obama—during the Obama years. He, like Marco Rubio and lots of other Republicans, spent years claiming that Obama was weak on Putin, that he was insufficiently militaristic when it came to confronting what people like Mike Pompeo call the threat of Islamic jihadism or radicalism. He wanted to confront Assad further. When he went to the CIA, he became, you know, a Trump loyalist, but also a militarist. He was out there saying things like Russia is a grave enemy of the United States; WikiLeaks is an arm of the Russian government, and we need to crush it.

So, there’s this really bizarre reality in Washington, which is, on the one hand, everybody keeps claiming that Trump is really weak on Russia, that he’s a puppet of the Kremlin, that he takes orders from Vladimir Putin; and, on the other hand, he’s surrounded by people who are vehement militarists and anti-Russian hawks, people who spent seven years accusing Obama of being too weak in confronting Putin, and who want to confront Russia further. And you’ve seen Trump do things to confront Putin that Obama himself refused to do: arming anti-Russian factions in Ukraine; bombing an airfield of Assad; now denouncing Putin specifically as being responsible for the attack; expelling dozens of Russian diplomats, more than any other; imposing sanctions on oligarchs close to Vladimir Putin. And so this narrative that Trump is a puppet of Putin, and that the Kremlin has infiltrated the United States government and controls the U.S., is very much at odds with the reality of what the Trump administration is doing and the people who are actually running foreign policy and the things that they actually believe. And Mike Pompeo is one of the principal people who illustrates that kind of breach between the narrative and the reality.

AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, Pompeo, in various interviews, has talked about—it seems that he sees Syria as a place to confront Iran. And then, the whole issue of Rex Tillerson being for the nuclear deal in Iran, but President Trump—and, it looks like, Mike Pompeo—very much against.

GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, one of the really dangerous aspects—remember, when Rex Tillerson was nominated for secretary of state, he was held up as kind of Exhibit A as proof that Donald Trump was an agent of the Kremlin, because Rex Tillerson, as the CEO of Exxon, did a lot of business with Russia, as most oil companies obviously would. He was perceived as being friendly with the Russian government, because it was in the interest of Exxon to be friendly with the Russian government. And yet, as it turned out, Rex Tillerson was almost kind of like a moderating voice in the administration, in that he did favor the continuation of the Iran deal, which Vladimir Putin in Russia worked very closely with Barack Obama in the United States in order to facilitate. And the fact that he was booted out in exchange for Mike Pompeo, who is much more kind of maniacal when it comes to seeking confrontation in the world, including with Putin in Russia, again, I think, signifies that this administration, under Donald Trump, has moved away from Barack Obama’s posture of trying to accommodate Putin, of avoiding confrontation with him, and moving toward a posture of confronting Russia, in Ukraine and especially in Syria and when it comes to Iran.

And this is why, Amy, I think that, you know, the whole debate around Russia over the last 12 months has been so dangerous, because this climate has been created in Washington, the premise of which is that Vladimir Putin and Russia are an existential threat to the United States, that they’re our prime enemy, much like they were during the Cold War, and that we need to confront them further, and any failure on the part of Donald Trump to confront Putin militaristically and directly is proof that he did collude with the Russians or is an agent of Russia. And it’s created this incentive scheme on the part of the Trump administration to try and confront Russia even further. And that is what they’re doing. And it’s a very dangerous game to play, given that Russia and the United States still have thousands of missiles with nuclear tips aimed at each other’s cities, with very archaic, unreliable trigger systems from the Cold War still in place governing how those missiles could be used.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, in Brazil, former President [Luiz] Inácio Lula da Silva has begun serving a 12-year sentence for a controversial corruption conviction. After missing a 5 p.m. Friday deadline, Lula turned himself in to police on Saturday, following a standoff during which he spent the night in São Paulo’s steelworkers’ union building. Lula’s supporters gathered outside, many hoping he would defy orders to surrender. On Saturday, Lula addressed thousands of his supporters and members of his Workers’ Party.

LUIZ INÁCIO LULA DA SILVA: [translated] I am doing a very conscious, very conscious thing. I told the comrades that if it depends on my will, I would not go. But I will go. I am going because they are going to say tomorrow that Lula is out of the way, that Lula is hidden. No, I am not hiding. I am going to go there and see their faces, so they know I’m not afraid, so they know that I am not going to run, and so they know I’m going to prove my innocence. They need to know that. … I want to go there and tell the delegate, “I am at your disposal.” The history of the next few days will prove that the delegate who accused me was the one who committed the crime. It was the judge who judged me, and the public ministry lied to me.

AMY GOODMAN: Last week, the Brazilian Supreme Court rejected of Lula’s bid to stay out of jail while he appealed his conviction, effectively removing him from Brazil’s presidential election later this year, where he was the front-runner. Lula is a former union leader who served as president of Brazil from 2003 to 2010. During that time, he helped lift tens of millions of Brazilians out of poverty. His supporters say the ruling against him is a continuation of the right-wing coup that ousted Lula’s ally, President Dilma Rousseff, from power in 2015. Last year, Dilma Rousseff said, quote, “The first chapter of the coup was my impeachment. But there’s a second chapter, and that is stopping President Lula from becoming a candidate for next year’s elections.”

Still with us in Rio de Janeiro is Glenn Greenwald, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, one of the founding editors of The Intercept. Can you talk about what happened this weekend, the fact that now former president and presidential candidate currently, Lula, is in prison?

GLENN GREENWALD: It’s a complicated situation. But it’s also extraordinary. Lula is a singular political force. His political story, there’s just nothing like it, the way he came from extreme poverty and illiteracy as a child to rule the fifth-largest country in the world through an overwhelming democratic mandate. To see him in prison is a shock to the system.

It’s even more disturbing, given what has happened. If you look at the last 16 years in Brazil, it’s so important to keep in mind that the Workers’ Party, which Lula helped found and then led, has won four consecutive national elections in this country—2002, 2006, 2010 and 2014. And the two people who won those elections and who became president were—the first two was Lula, and the second two was Dilma. Last year, or, rather, in 2016, Dilma was impeached, so she was removed from office, even though she was the elected president, and installed in her place was somebody who could never have won, somebody who has embraced a right-wing ideology that would never have prevailed in any election, so the entire ideology of the country was changed with no election, by removing Dilma from office, even though she had won two elections. And now, Lula, who not only won re-election with an overwhelming mandate, but was planning on running for president again this year—there’s an election later this year—and was leading in all polls—it was, I think, almost a certainty that he was going to win—has now been removed from being able to run, and put into prison. So, whatever else is true, there are a lot of factions in Brazil that have spent 16 years trying to defeat PT at the ballot box, the Workers’ Party, and have failed to do so and have now used anti-democratic means—impeachment and the court system—to destroy the party, to destroy the ability of the two people who have been elected to actually exercise political power.

Now, that isn’t to say that Lula is innocent or that he, because of his political popularity and the extraordinary achievements that he was able to realize for this country and for tens of millions of people who had been lifted out of poverty under his presidency, that he’s above the rule of law or that he shouldn’t be punished if he’s actually corrupt. But there are several corruption cases against Lula that were always considered the more serious ones, and those have not yet come to trial. So, nobody should be assuming he’s guilty of those things, because there’s been no trial.

The one thing he has been convicted of is this tiny little case that everybody always considered extremely dubious, that has been filled with judicial irregularities, that clearly is the byproduct of this judicial obsession on the part of Sérgio Moro, the head judge of the corruption investigations, to put Lula in prison. It became a personal fixation on his part. And the evidence that was used to convict him—and the charge was that Lula received a triplex apartment and renovations from a construction company in order to get contracts from Petrobras—the evidence is basically nonexistent that Lula was even the owner of that apartment or that, as Judge Moro admitted, the renovations were done in connection with getting contracts from Petrobras.

So, it’s all kinds of reasons to suspect that what’s really going on is politically motivated, especially when you consider the fact that there are huge numbers of extremely powerful politicians on the right—including the president of this country who was installed; Dilma’s 2014 opponent Aécio Neves; the governor of São Paulo, who Lula defeated in 2006, Geraldo Alckmin, who’s running for president again this year—who are extremely corrupt, among the most corrupt politicians in all of Latin America, who not only remain out of prison and free, but still in power. It really creates this very strong appearance that, whatever else you think of Lula and whether he’s actually corrupt, this is not an act of justice, this is an act of political vengeance and a political abuse of the law to remove political enemies and destroy a political party that they’ve not been able to defeat at the ballot box.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Glenn, could you talk a little bit about the current president, Michel Temer, and the corruption allegations against him and why he’s still remaining as president, while, meanwhile, Dilma was impeached, and Lula is now prevented from running again?

GLENN GREENWALD: I mean, that’s the key question, right? That’s the key question, that, when you ask it, Juan, illustrates exactly what’s going on here. I have criticisms of PT. I think that PT is a party that does have serious problems with corruption. I interviewed Lula in 2016, and I asked him that question, and he agreed that his own party, PT, has serious problems with corruption. PT—the reason people like Eduardo Cunha and Michel Temer were in power is because PT created an alliance with them in order to win the election. They ran with Michel Temer, who’s part of this centrist party that’s really a kind of party of organized crime.

Nonetheless, after Michel Temer was installed as president, when Dilma was impeached, he got caught on tape—there’s an audiotape that the entire country has heard, in which he is ordering bribes to be paid to members of his own party in order to keep them silent as part of the corruption investigation, so that they don’t implicate other people who are closely related to Temer. Literally, the president of this country, who was installed in the name of fighting corruption, got caught on tape ordering bribes to silence witnesses, including Eduardo Cunha, who is the former House speaker, who presided over Dilma’s impeachment during the House proceeding that the entire world watched, and who is now in prison because he’s basically just a gangster. He’s, you know, a member of organized crime. That’s who the president of this country, Michel Temer, ordered to be paid bribes in order to ensure his silence.

And yet, the same people who voted to impeach Dilma, in the name of fighting corruption—because they’re so offended by corruption—the same people who are today cheering Lula’s imprisonment on the grounds that corruption must not be protected and there can be no impunity, have repeatedly voted to protect Michel Temer, the president of this country, from any kind of accountability. They won’t impeach him. They won’t allow the courts to investigate him, even though everybody heard with their own ears him ordering bribes to be paid. There’s tons of other evidence that he, himself, has received personal bribes. And that’s why I say, whatever you think of Lula, whatever you think of Dilma, whatever you think of PT—and there are valid criticisms of all of them—it is impossible to maintain with a straight face that what this is about is punishing corruption or subjecting everybody to the rule of law, given that the political parties most loved by the elites—PMDB and the right-wing PSDB—have been utterly protected, with very rare exception, from far worse acts of lawbreaking and criminality, and continue to remain in power and run the country.

AMY GOODMAN: And just to clarify for people, PT is the Workers’ Party in Brazil. Glenn, I wanted to go to the interview that I did with Lula, speaking on Democracy Now! just a few weeks ago. And I asked him about the role of the Brazilian press.

LUIZ INÁCIO LULA DA SILVA: [translated] I was president for eight years. Dilma was president for four years. And for 12 years, all the press did was to try to destroy my image and her image and the image of my party. I have more negative subject matter about me in the leading television news program of Brazil than all of the presidents in the whole history of Brazil. In other words, it’s a daily attempt to massacre me, to tell untruths about Lula, about Lula’s family. And the only weapon that I have is to confront them. And they’re irritated, because after they massacred me for four years, any opinion poll by any polling institute showed that Lula was going win the elections in Brazil.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Lula on Democracy Now!, and you can go to the whole hour interview. But, Glenn, can you clarify the role of the press in all of this? And does this mean, by the way, him being in prison now, that he cannot—he absolutely cannot continue to run? But talk about the press.

GLENN GREENWALD: Sure. So, this narrative that Lula embraces, and just articulated in the interview that you played with him that you did, is one that he has been—that basically he rode to power, which is the idea that he represents the poor and the marginalized and the powerless in the country against these powerful forces led by the families that control the media. And there is a lot of truth to that.

The Brazilian media is probably the most homogenized, most oligarchical, most repressive and most propagandistic of any media in any country that I’ve looked at as a reporter and a journalist, which includes, obviously, the United States and the U.K. and many in Europe. It is incredibly abusive of the journalistic function, because of the tiny number of extremely rich families who control it and who have the same interest and who use their media outlets to propagandize the country. Unlike in the U.S. and in the U.K. and in Europe, there hasn’t been the kind of vibrant, well-funded, independent media that has arisen. The internet has opened it up a little bit, but not as much as it needs. And so, they do still continue to exercise, although less power than they did a decade ago, very—a stranglehold over public opinion in Brazil. And Lula and Dilma are right to say that the media was monomaniacally devoted to the impeachment of Dilma and the destruction of PT and their reputation.

Having said that, it is also true that Lula became somewhat comfortable with political power and financial power here in Brazil, and they became somewhat comfortable with him. It reminds me a little bit of the Democratic Party. I mean, Lula began as a union leader, as somebody who came from poverty, as a real radical, and over time made compromises in order to moderate his message and gain power. And a lot of the oligarchs who went to prison, such as Odebrecht and others, were working hand in glove with PT. So this narrative that it’s the elites versus PT is a lot blurrier than Lula likes to suggest.

But he’s absolutely right that the media here is incredibly corrupt. They use all of their power to undermine the left and to promote free-market candidates, because that’s who their owners prefer, because that’s who are good for their owners, and they allow very little dissent. If you listen to Brazilian political television, they all, you know, are basically endangering their own necks by risking injury constantly nodding with one another, because there’s an orthodoxy that’s enforced in a way that no other media that I’m familiar with has. The only thing I can compare it to is the 2002 run-up to the Iraq War.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Glenn—

GLENN GREENWALD: With Lula out of office—yeah?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, Glenn, I just wanted to ask another question, before we move on to the situation in Gaza, which is: How do you see what’s going to happen next? Does the Workers’ Party have a viable candidate now to run for the presidency? And also, talk about the—if you can in just a few seconds, the right-wing candidate that is being compared to the “Brazilian Trump.”

GLENN GREENWALD: Right. Well, this is the big question now, is that the—there’s a fascist candidate, an actually fascist candidate, who is 10 times more extreme than Trump on all of those fascist questions, whose name is Jair Bolsonaro, who was actually in the military during the military dictatorship, that only ended in 1985, and seems to crave a return of it. He praises the torturers of the military dictatorship and talks about that era as though it’s something that we want to return to. And for a long time, it seemed like Lula was only one who could stop him. He’s very high in the polls. He has a lot of support, because the country has lost faith in the entire political elite.

And now it’s a real question, with Lula almost certainly unable to run: Who is the left going to unite behind? It doesn’t seem like PT is going to field a viable candidate. There are other parties, such as PSOL and PCdoB, which are on the left and do have candidates, who Lula has been praising. I hope the left is going to unite behind one candidate, so it doesn’t divide itself and allow Bolsonaro to risk winning. But it is a real danger that fascism and military dictatorship could return to this very large and beautiful country, especially with Lula out of the picture.

AMY GOODMAN: Before we go to break, you’re wearing a pin, Glenn. Can you talk about Marielle Franco, very quickly? We have talked extensively about her, also with Lula, and her assassination just weeks ago.

GLENN GREENWALD: So, Wednesday will mark the one-month mark of Marielle’s assassination. She was an extraordinary figure, as evidenced by the fact that even though she was just a city councilwoman in a city in Latin America, her death resonated around the world, the more people got to know about her. She was an incredible inspiration to millions of people throughout Brazil who have been traditionally voiceless. She had a remarkable political future ahead of her. She was a very close friend of my husband and myself and our family. And so far, there’s been no arrests. There’s some indication the police are making some progress. But whoever ordered her killed is very powerful, as evidenced by the professionalism with which her execution was carried out. And it’s absolutely crucial that not just the people who pulled the trigger, but those who ordered them to do it, who are in high, powerful places, be apprehended as soon as possible.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: On Saturday, hundreds of mourners gathered in Gaza for the funeral of Palestinian journalist Yaser Murtaja, who was fatally shot by the Israeli army while covering a fresh round of daily protests along the Israeli-Gaza border. Photos show the 30-year-old journalist was wearing a flak jacket clearly marked ”PRESS” at the time of the shooting. He’s one of at least nine Palestinians who were killed by the Israeli army during its brutal crackdown against Friday’s protests. The Palestinian Health Ministry says Israeli forces have killed 31 people in total since Palestinians kicked off a 6-week-long nonviolent protest late last month, dubbed “The Great March of Return.”

AMY GOODMAN: Both the International Criminal Court and the United Nations have rebuked Israel in recent days and warned its actions on the border could violate international human rights conventions.

We are continuing our conversation with Glenn Greenwald, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. Glenn, can you talk about what’s happened in Gaza over the last two weeks, with Avigdor Lieberman, the high-level Israeli official, saying that no Gazan is innocent?

GLENN GREENWALD: I think it’s just time to acknowledge and accept the reality of what Israel is. Whatever you thought of Israel in the past, believing that it was some kind of bastion of liberal democracy in the Middle East, that it was surrounded by primitive brutal enemies, all the propaganda, what’s clear now is that Israel is something quite different than all of that. And even people who once believed that are now starting to come and see that Israel is an apartheid, rogue, terrorist state. The conduct that it engages in, continually and without apology, proudly, and the comments that it makes, including the one you just referenced from the defense minister, Avigdor Lieberman, who said there are no innocent people in Gaza, which is basically the mentality of a genocidal maniac, is reflective of what Israel is.

And I think the context here is so critical, which is that a lot of people have come to realize that Benjamin Netanyahu is this far-right, bloodthirsty, militaristic figure. And what’s amazing about it is that in the context of Israeli politics, Benjamin Netanyahu resides in the center of Israeli politics, if not almost now on the left. There’s very little political force to his left. All the political force is to his right. The younger generation of Israeli leaders think that Netanyahu is too moderate, that he’s too centrist, that he’s too soft on the Palestinians. They don’t believe in a Palestinian state. They don’t pretend to support the two-state solution. They want to dominate that land forever. They believe they’re religiously entitled to it. They want to—basically, they believe in apartheid, a policy of apartheid, forever suppressing what is soon to be the majority, the Palestinians, ruled by a minority of Israelis, using whatever war crimes and slaughter and murder they need to in order to suppress and intimidate that population.

And if seeing the Israeli military gun down children on a Gazan beach in 2014 while they played soccer, or end the life of a journalist on purpose, who is wearing a press jacket, by putting a bullet in him, through a sniper, doesn’t show you what the Israeli government really is, what will? And I think the question now is, you know, all these people in the West who love to go around urging humanitarian intervention, and the West needs to stop Assad, the West needs to stop Gaddafi, the West needs to stop Saddam Hussein—doesn’t the West need to stop the Israeli government? At the very least, stop arming it and sending it money and sending it intelligence and providing diplomatic cover? Because the Western governments that do that, led by the U.K. and the United States, are very much complicit in everything that’s being done to the Palestinians, which are war crimes and, increasingly, apartheid and genocide.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Glenn, quickly, the impact of the Palestinian nonviolent protests now that are occurring, the constant protests that—of the people pouring out of Gaza to the barrier with Israel?

GLENN GREENWALD: Look at how—what Western discourse says, Juan, about what Palestinians are permitted to do. So, if Palestinians kill troops, Israeli troops, occupying their land, which every country in the world would claim the right to do—if there were Russian troops occupying the U.S., it would be cheered if people killed them. But when Palestinians kill military soldiers occupying their land, they’re called terrorists. When Palestinians advocate a nonviolent boycott of Israel in order to pressure them to end the occupation, the way people did in the ’80s successfully against the South African apartheid regime, that’s called anti-Semitism. When Palestinians nonviolently protest at the border, they’re accused of being agents of Hamas who deserve to be slaughtered.

The discourse of the West is that Palestinians have no right to resist or protest this decades-long occupation. They don’t have a right to do so violently, and they have no right to do so nonviolently. The only thing Western discourse tells Palestinians they’re permitted to do is to meekly acquiesce and submit to and obey the dictates of the Israeli government. And I think the world is finally starting to wake up to the fact that this discourse is incredibly immoral and that—

AMY GOODMAN: Five seconds.

GLENN GREENWALD: —Palestinians have just the same rights as everybody else to protest and resist.