Journalist Held Captive: Unarguably a US Priority

Washington DC: the NATIONAL PRESS CLUB’s banner demanding freedom for reporter AUSTIN TICE

IN MY MOST RECENT The Media Beat BROADCAST/PODCAST, I promised a dispatch from Washington DC. Well, I have indeed spent some time now in the nation’s capital … and I can reliably report that the place is still (quite obviously) abuzz with transition news and gossip.

There are the lame-duck Biden Administration’s last acts (pardons, commutations and some more substantive bits of legacy-cementing) plus a more aggravating kind of concern, the incoming Administration’s challenging — many would say outrageous — nominations of the Trump faithful.

Meanwhile, of course, the rest of the world continues to turn, oblivious to Washington. Not least has come the stunningly fast collapse of Syria’s brutal, 50-year dynastic dictatorship, the father-and son lineage of Hafez Al-Assad and then Bashar Al-Assad, a collapse that was followed by the son’s desperate flight to the safety of Russia and his protector Vladimir Putin.

This hasty relocation led my favorite satirists at ‘The Onion’ to fantasize about Assad’s new life. There was, in reality, a point in the 1990s when the young Bashar was presumably considering a career outside the family business, and he studied opthamology, qualifying at an eye hospital in London. So The Onion imagined him now taking a job at a Moscow branch of LensCrafters. (Creatively pictured at right.)

The war-torn country Assad left behind is now taken over by a loose, somewhat unsteady alliance of rebels, prominent among them violent Islamic extremists who are now publicly claiming a new reasonableness.

So what is the world’s purported super-power to do about all this? Well, Donald Trump is taking his familiar hands-off, isolationist stance. In his wording “THE US SHOULD HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH IT … DO NOT GET INVOLVED!” all in capital letters on his social media site.  Chiming in as well has been his controversial nominee for Director of National Intelligence, the former Democrat, former Congresswoman, former Army medic in Iraq, Tulsi Gabbard. She had to face some probing questions in private meetings with US Senators who have to confirm her appointment, concerns about her alleged cosiness in paying a visit to Assad during an especially brutal phase of the Syrian civil war, seven years ago. She even told her followers online at the time that Syria was a “secular, pluralistic, free society.”

But now in 2024, after those talks she had on Capitol Hill, Gabbard’s differently-shaded statement to reporters went along these lines … and we’re going hear a lot more of this kind of vacuous language from nominees as their confirmation process continues:

“I stand in full support,” said Gabbard, “and wholeheartedly agree with the statements that President Trump has made over these last few days.”

Gabbard is also, I predict, going to encounter no real hindrance to being confirmed — and that will also be true of the vast majority of Trump’s choices, no matter how inappropriate and ill-prepared a crew they might represent. A mood of resentful quiescence toward Trump is hanging over Washington, and not only among Democrats .

IN SYRIA , THE WILD SCENES of public jubilation at the Assad overthrow are mixed with considerable, inevitable chaos — and also multiple, criss-crossing fears over just what kind of regime will rule the country from now on. International journalists have rushed back into the country after years of absence, many of them for sensible safety’s sake observing the war from Beirut, in neighboring Lebanon.

And as in all too many post-war situations, particularly when a repressive autocracy has been trying to crush an insurgency, much of the journalistic work now entails the painstaking and gruesome task of reconstructing the vicious details of that repression. Revealing what horrors went on, for instance, in the underground torture dungeons of Sednaya Prison in Damascus … marshaling yet more concrete evidence for Assad’s obscene use of chemical weapons against civilians, including women and children … and accompanying anxious families as they try to trace and identify loved ones who were disappeared by the security forces, some to be found only as mangled corpses in a mortuary or dumped on waste ground, or simply not found at all – perhaps buried in mass graves yet to be exhumed.

Among all this dredging through material and human wreckage there does lie, whatever Trump and Co might say … a matter that is a pressing and undoubted American responsibility. While many reporters escaped and are now returning … one journalist, Austin Tice, an American, has been there all along. Or has he? Is he still there? Is he even still alive? He reported for the McClatchy news service, the Washington Post and CBS News until he was seized in 2012 - by whom, it’s not entirely clear - but American intelligence agencies have at various points since then indicated that the Assad regime was holding him. Agonizingly, as was reported only this week by the Reuters news agency, Tice - a resourceful former marine – had managed to make his escape after a few months of captivity, in early 2013 … only to be recaptured by elements of the Assad security apparatus. What has happened now, with Assad’s toppling?

Early on President Joe Biden expressed hope. “We believe he’s alive,” he said, then quickly acknowledged, “but we have no direct evidence for that yet.” All the same, he went on to say, “we think we can get him back.” Biden in fact sent America’s chief hostage expert Roger Carstens (pictured left) to the Middle East, though not into Syria itself (not initially, at least). His mission was to scope out the chances by indirect means of finding and returning the journalist.

Carstens is credited with helping to win freedom for over a dozen hostages or wrongfully-detained Americans around the world, He’s a former Special Forces lieutenant-colonel, with on-the-ground rescue mission experience — and he’s also that rare specimen in today’s DC, a Trump appointee whom Biden kept on, objectively recognizing his abilities. Regrettably, I’d say, but perhaps not surprisingly, Trump himself doesn’t approve of Carstens now; and he plans to replace him, with a former venture capitalist and healthcare investment company executive Adam Boehler. Boehler was once a college roommate of Jared Kushner and much later helped Kushner achieve the first Trump Administration’s so-named ‘Abraham Accords’ in the Middle East.

If the work of finding Tice has to stretch into Trump’s new term of office … what are the prospects for how they’ll be handled?

Naturally enough, the Tice family, led by Austin’s mother, Debra Tice (pictured right, with son’s photo) have been redoubling their efforts to keep their lost family-member prominent in the nation’s consciousness. Surrounded by Austin’s siblings and nephews and nieces, she spoke at Washington’s National Press Club, went on NBC’s Meet The Press and then the PBS NewsHour — and also very shrewdly attended the reopening of the new Syrian regime’s embassy in Washington. In the words of a statement from the Press Freedom Center, which is based at the Press Club and has been supporting the Tice family in its efforts: “Mrs Tice wishes to express her gratitude to the new government for efforts on the ground in Damascus to help find her son.”

Mrs Tice received what she calls credible information that her son might be in a particular prison in the moutainous district of Qasioun a few miles north of the capital. But a close search was impossible because, alarmingly, that area was being bombarded by Israel’s armed forces. So Mrs Tice sent an urgent plea to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu requesting a pause in the Israeli strikes. Instead of launching attacks, she said the Prime Minister should “deploy Israeli assets to search for Austin Tice and other prisoners.” Netanyahu perhaps surprisingly changed tack, and in response said the Israeli Defense Force would now be “not active in the area where Austin may be.” We have yet to see if there turns out to be much of an active IDF search for Austin. But the Israeli shift is significant – it looks like the Tice family campaign is gaining some clout with governments.

The Tice family has some knowledge of Trump’s people, too. Perhaps surprisingly, they previosuly had dealings with Trump’s current pick for leading the FBI, the devoted Kash Patel (pictured left).

It’s not well known — in fact it was kept as an official secret at the time — but four years ago Patel, then a deputy to Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, accompanied the hostage envoy Carstens on a mission directly into Syria, actually meeting with Assad’s national security adviser Ali Mamlouk, in an effort then to free Austin Tice.  

A US diplomat briefed journalists off-the-record that this was a Trump team attempt aimed at pulling off an “October Surprise” by bringing home an American hostage to bolster Trump just before the 2020 election. Trump wrote a personal letter to Assad appeaing for the reporter’s release. It failed of course. The Assad regime would not play ball.

But there are different Syrians in charge now. How much they want to help - or even can - is uncertain. And in America’s capital, for the existing Administration at least, the Tice case is what National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan called on ABC Television “a top priority for us.” It’s possible that Turkey might be able to offer back-channel assistance. We must all hope that this ‘top priority’ gets addressed swiftly and successfully.

I for one am perturbed by the thought of a solution not being achieved before the end of Biden’s time, and that this one journalist’s fate comes to depend upon the diplomatic skills of Kash Patel.