[ad_1]
And so these birthdays for this young man who is growing old mean something beyond marking another trip around the sun. They are an act of faith and hope, even as they go without him, the milestone years — his 35th, his 40th last year, when the piñata seemed like the perfect touch — and the others. Each arrived without complete answers, but not without a deep-seated belief that their story would ultimately end well.
On Wednesday, President Biden added a heightened level of specificity to the decade-long saga, saying in a statement that “we know for sure that [Austin] is being held by the government of Syria.” This was a change from the past, when US officials tended to be guarded about whether they believed Austin was being held by the Syrian government or government-linked groups.
With Biden’s attention so clearly focused on their son, this year’s birthday, so close to the 10th anniversary of his captivity, is a little different for the Tices. Debra Tice is celebrating her son’s 41st birthday in Washington without a big party, but she’s still doing what she’s done with persistence and consistency: pushing. Hard.
At various times, the Tices have been furious with the FBI, the State Department, the White House, the media and themselves. They pressed three presidents and nothing. They demanded more engagement with the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad.
Both Tices have been in the public eye, demanding the government do more – Mark, a clean-cut 64-year-old who is usually the more measured and soft-spoken one; Debra, the fiery embodiment of family torment. She has not been afraid to confront bureaucrats, especially those she deems useless, lazy, or unwilling.
“I’m Austin’s mom — I’m not going to be intimidated,” she said in an interview this week. When she goes to Washington, she is there to demand action from the highest levels of government. “I’m not there for tea and cakes,” said Debra, 61, with dazzling white shoulder-length hair and a piercing gaze.
Her outspoken and unflinching manner, her boundless energy and maternal instinct to protect her son can be inspiring and empowering, said Bill McCarron, executive director of the National Press Club, who has championed Austin’s cause. “She has a softening,” he said. But he also worries that her confrontational style can sometimes work against her.
“She’s not the easiest person to get along with,” McCarron said. “She takes no fools.”
McCarron tried to acquaint her with the strange and disturbing mores of Washington: how the capital can often be a place of deceit and empty promises. But she can’t accept these truths, a trait McCarron admires in her. In her own way, she’s not only pushing for her son, but she’s also pushing for Washington as a place and the US government as an institution to do better.
Debra recently met with a large group of State Department officials in Washington. She concluded that many in the department had decided it was “not viable” to secure her son’s release, despite Secretary of State Anthony Blinken publicly and privately supporting it. Internal “barriers,” as the Tices describe them, have been raised because so many people in the department have essentially given up on bringing their son home.
“You will be shocked when you see [Austin] walk free,” Debra told them.
She uses some colorful language to demand that they work harder instead of, as she sees it, sitting back and claiming they can do very little or nothing. They didn’t push. Not like she’s pushing. “It’s just your little slip you’re writing for yourself,” she told them.
Recounting the encounter, her voice rises to a crescendo: “Bam!” she said flatly in that Texas drawl. “Oh my God. They were shocked.
State Department officials declined requests for an interview or to discuss details of the meeting. “We are actively engaged with Syrian officials to bring Austin Tice home,” a senior administration official said in an emailed statement. “But Syria has never even acknowledged holding it.”
Invitation and decision
Austin was a “challenging” child, his mother fondly recalls. There is never a dull moment in his life, always charging into the world.
“He’s so intense,” she said. “He’s so fully alive, so ready to go.”
He was an Eagle Scout. He joined the Marine Corps as an infantry officer and served in Iraq and Afghanistan, after which he remained in the reserves. He graduated from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and was attending the university’s law school in 2012 when he decided to go to Syria as a freelance journalist, becoming one of the few reporters at the time in this most dangerous nation for journalists . While there, he contributed to The Washington Post and CBS News and won the Polk Award, one of journalism’s most prestigious honors, for his reporting on the Syrian civil war for McClatchy Newspapers.
Those first terrible weeks of his captivity stayed with her, even now. She blames herself for not getting on the plane right away, instead of following the advice she received from American officials to take such unconvincing steps as scheduling a press conference.
“I can’t tell you, with seven kids, how many times I’ve gotten in the car and driven to a place where they’ve had a car accident, jumped in the car and flown to where they were at school because they were sick,” she said in the interview. “When something happens, I show up. Why did I keep my feet on the wrong side of the ocean?”
Just three months later, she and her husband boarded that plane, landing in Beirut, where she planned to arrange a drive to Damascus at the invitation of Syrian officials.
Then they get a call from an FBI agent working on their son’s case. The agent, who they declined to identify, berated Mark Tice, saying the road was not safe and they were about to orphan their other six children. Journalists told them the opposite; The Tices believe they have been fed “misinformation.”
Under pressure from the FBI agent, Debra said, she decided not to go. A decade later, she still laments taking the agent’s advice. She has gone out of her way to apologize to the Syrian government over the years.
“To not accept that invitation, we have no idea what the ongoing ramifications of that are,” she said.
FBI officials declined to be interviewed or comment on Debra Tice’s account. In a statement emailed to The Post, the bureau said, “The FBI and our U.S. government partners in the Hostage Recovery Fusion Cell are constantly working to return Austin Tice and other Americans held abroad back home to their families. The FBI is committed to this mission, in close coordination with the victim’s family members, no matter how much time passes.
Debra Tice eventually made it to Damascus in 2014. She met with everyone she could, including Syrian government officials. Finally, he received a message from a high-ranking Syrian official: “I will not meet the mother. Submit a United States Government official of appropriate rank.
Questions and concerns remain
Years passed and the Tices never heard of any meetings about their son involving American and Syrian officials. And the main questions remained: Why exactly this journalist? What will the Syrians gain by keeping him this long without any public recognition? Why are there no hostage plea videos? Why no ransom demand? In this information vacuum, news organizations, including Reporters Without Borders, took up his cause. The Post featured Austin in a 2019 Super Bowl ad.
Finally, in 2020 there appeared to be a break: Kash Patel, the Trump administration’s National Security Council counterterrorism chief, and Roger Carstens, the president’s envoy on hostage issues, traveled to Syria for what they described as the first direct US diplomatic engagement with Syria in a decade. “It was a one-time thing,” Mark Tice said. Instead, he said, the United States should lean on the basics of hostage deals: engagement, negotiation and concessions.
After the Syria trip came to light, Debra Tice accused then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo of “undermining” President Donald Trump’s directive to bring her son home because he said he would “separate” prisoner issues from the broad foreign policy letter. Carstens came to Pompeo’s defense.
In the interview with The Post, Debra raised another concern with the Biden administration, singling out national security adviser Jake Sullivan for what she said was not following her boss’s direction. She recalls a May 2022 meeting she and her husband had with Biden. Right there, in front of the Tices in the Oval Office, Biden instructed national security officials at the meeting to contact the Syrians and find out what they wanted in exchange for Austin’s release, Debra recalled.
Three months later, she believes no contact has been made. “I’m not sure if all the phone lines in D.C. are down or if there was some sort of solar flare,” she said. “They don’t have internet anymore? I’m not really sure what the obstacles are. But they can certainly fly here and use my phone if they have to.
She and her husband have learned over the course of three White House administrations that the people working under the president can thwart his goals, Debra said. (Sullivan did not respond to interview requests.)
All the while she is baffled by what appears to be stagnation. The United States does not recognize that new approaches must be used to save its son, she argued. She seethed that she was unaware of any calls from U.S. officials to Syria at a time when Biden even sparred on camera with Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince linked to the killing of Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.
The Post’s publisher, Fred Ryan, was a vocal advocate of Austin Tice’s return. In 2021, Ryan wrote an editorial published in The Post saying, “The United States must never stand by when dictatorships take our citizens hostage. But the crime is particularly outrageous when the victims are journalists who provide the information and perspective our democracy needs to function, often at great personal risk. On Tuesday, he unveiled a 12-foot-by-8-foot banner over The Post’s main entrance that reads #BringAustinHome. The White House also took note. In his statement the next day, Biden was long on promises and hope, but short on specifics about what was or could be done: “I’m calling on Syria to end this and help us to [Austin] At home.”
In their grief, Tices know what will happen every year as August 14 approaches; they know the drill. The reporters will call. Cascades of them. Those “quote and unquote anniversary interviews” are appreciated, Austin’s father said. But then the reporters mostly leave. It’s a short rain when what they’re hoping for is “steady rain,” Debra said. Ones that last all year, that last until Austin comes home.
They plan to appear at the National Press Club on Sunday for the 10-year anniversary event. An invitation went out a while ago. We hope it’s billed as a “Welcome Home Party for Austin Tice.” But the event will go on whether he is home or not.
[ad_2]
Source link