With blindfolds to symbolize the plight of captives, the parents of missing journalist Austin Tice on Thursday launched a campaign to raise awareness of his ordeal and to push for reforms to U.S. hostage policies.
Marc and Debra Tice, together with the journalist advocacy group Reporters Without Borders, said the goal of the renewed campaign is to intensify pressure, through social media and other publicity, on both the “Syrian entity” holding their son and on the Obama administration to win his freedom.
Tice disappeared near Damascus in August 2012. His parents said they’ve been assured that he’s alive and not with the Islamic State militant group, though they declined to elaborate.
“We’ve come to the realization that in Austin’s case we really have two entities best placed to bring him home – one is the United States government and one is the Syrian government,” Marc Tice told a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington.
The new campaign encourages people to post photos of themselves on social media, wearing blindfolds, with the hashtag #freeaustintice. Starting the week of Feb. 16, digital banners calling for his release will appear on more than 250 news sites in a project that Reporters Without Borders called “a first in U.S. media history.” McClatchy is participating in the project.
“We’re starting now, and we’re going loud,” Debra Tice said.
The Tices said they spent more than three hours on Monday with the government officials tasked with reviewing U.S. hostage policies, which families of captives have complained are too inflexible and disjointed to be successful.
But the frustrations, Debra Tice said, have been many: A U.S. government that doesn’t share information with her or seemingly among its own departments. An FBI that seems interested in finding out what she knows, but doesn’t tell her what it knows. An administration that refuses to talk to the Syrian government, even though both governments have assured her they want to see her son returned home.
“They have this common interest but they won’t talk to one another,” Debra Tice said before the news conference. “How about one chat? A single-agenda meeting?”
Later, she added, “I don’t believe in not speaking. How is that an effective form of diplomacy?”
Austin Tice’s satellite phone, which he used to communicate with his editors at McClatchy and at The Washington Post and his family in Houston, last transmitted in the midafternoon Syrian time on Aug. 13, 2012. The Tices think their son was kidnapped the next day as he began a trip that was to take him from south of Damascus, where he’d been reporting for several weeks, to Beirut, the Lebanese capital.
The only news of him since has been a video that was posted to YouTube on Sept. 26, 2012. It shows an obviously distraught Tice, blindfolded, being led up a hillside by his captors. The video breaks off as he’s heard speaking fractured Arabic, then saying, “Jesus. Oh, Jesus.”
Since that video was posted, the Tices have traveled to Beirut twice in hopes of making contact with someone who can help them win their son’s release. They’ve given television and newspaper interviews. They’ve spent uncounted hours with officials of several countries. They’ve met repeatedly with the FBI agents assigned to investigate Austin’s kidnapping. Debra Tice described her relationship with the FBI as “acrimonious, in a middle-school kind of way.”
That’s been a theme of families of Americans who’ve been kidnapped in Syria, and it was echoed Wednesday by Diane Foley, whose son, journalist James Foley, was taken captive four months after Austin Tice and whose beheading by the Islamic State was recorded in a video posted online Aug. 19. Foley and the Tices joined in a panel discussion on American hostages held at the Newseum.
“I found out when Jim was killed from a hysterical AP reporter,” Diane Foley said Wednesday. “I never heard from the government until the president went on TV.”
She voiced other frustrations with the way the government had dealt with her son’s case, which began when he failed to return from Syria on Nov. 22, 2012. It was Thanksgiving Day.
“Our FBI knew where Jim was after six months,” she said, but the U.S. government was unwilling to do anything to win his release from his Islamist captors.
She said her son’s captors had been in regular contact for a month, making demands for his release. The FBI declined to communicate with them, she said, and told the Foleys they’d have to do the negotiations. “But we’re not negotiators,” she said. The FBI’s refusal to engage angered the captors, she said.
The FBI couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.
“It doesn’t make sense to me that no one would talk to Jim’s captors,” she said, adding, “Our government didn’t engage at a high-enough level.”
President Barack Obama has ordered a review of government hostage policy, and Debra Tice said she’d met Monday with the group that’s undertaking the review. The review is being led by the government’s National Counterterrorism Center, and Doug Frantz, the assistant secretary of state for public affairs, who also spoke Wednesday at the Newseum, said the government wanted to do better.
Between 70 and 80 people “across the government” are engaged full time in the review, which is led by a three-star general, he said, adding that the group gathers twice a week for six hours to discuss its progress. It’s contacted 83 hostages or family members and 20 have come forward to be interviewed, he said.
One issue not on the table, though, is paying ransom, the way several European journalists held by the Islamic State have won their freedom. “If we pay ransom, we put targets on the back of every American,” Frantz said.
Debra Tice disagreed. “When you’re looking at your primary goal is to get your hostage home, every option should be on the table,” she said.
The Tices said the officials told them the review should be complete by this spring, perhaps as early as March. If the government shuts them out of the reform process, Debra Tice said, “we are the pavement pounders and the door knockers, and we will be back.”