Michael Barbaro

So in the end, it's Maduro, not Trump, who forces these men's awful saga to come to an end.

So I just want to reflect on what happened in this prison and why it happened.

And at the end of the day, it happened because the Trump administration wanted it to happen.

And I'm old enough, and I suspect you are too, to remember when the United States had to reckon in a very visible and official way that

with the idea that it had carried out torture systematically after 9-11 to those that the U.S.

had detained in response to those terror attacks that year.

And when the conduct that occurred to these detainees was revealed, American officials, members of Congress—

were so offended and so convinced that it betrayed America's values that they released a report documenting it so the whole country could see it.

And they said, this will never happen again.

And here it is again, not conducted by the U.S.

per se, as it was after 9-11, but this time, in a sense, outsourced to a foreign country by American government officials.

How should we think about that?

Wow, they knew.

And why do you think that is, if you had to make an educated journalistic guess here?

I mean, first of all, that suggests that the men who end up in this prison in El Salvador have killed children, and I don't believe you found any evidence of that.

Putting that aside, this sounds like a spokesperson for the White House basically saying to the New York Times, we've seen all your reporting, we've seen these accounts of torture of men we put in this prison, and our response is, who cares?

Which is very striking.

I want to end by asking you what has become of men like Luis now that they are released?

Have they achieved anything resembling normalcy now that they are back in Venezuela, a country, of course, that they had sought to flee, which is why they came to the United States in the first place.

Now they are back having been through this experience.