Debra Tice shared declassified documents about her son Austin Tice’s case, revealing daily detention details. Photo / Getty Images
Debra Tice shared declassified documents about her son Austin Tice’s case, revealing daily detention details. Photo / Getty Images
The mother of Austin Tice shared recently declassified documents regarding her son’s case during an event at the National Press Club in Washington today marking 13 years since the American journalist and Marine veteran went missing outside Damascus, Syria.
The documents, some heavily redacted by the Government, were part ofa much larger trove of classified intelligence that the Tice family was given access to by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard earlier this year.
For years, while leading the effort to find her son, Debra Tice said she was told by United States officials that they did not have any new information.
She said the raw intelligence documents showed that was not the case.
“Our Government had information almost every single day of Austin Tice’s detention,” Debra Tice said.
The documents, she said, showed who was holding Tice and even included details about his captivity down to the times he was taken to seek medical treatment.
“When he had something [wrong] about his teeth, they took him to a dentist. When he had some stomach issues, they took him to doctor,” she said, without offering details about when the documents alleged this to have happened.
Austin Tice was a freelance writer contributing coverage of Syria’s civil war to outlets including the Washington Post when he was abducted on or around August 13, 2012, at age 31.
Numerous US officials have said the search for Tice has yielded little credible, verifiable information.
Journalist Austin Tice went missing in Syria in 2012 and has not been heard from since. Photo / Getty Images
A Post investigation into the Austin Tice case found that despite efforts that stretched across three US administrations involving diplomats, spies, businessmen, religious figures, journalists, and investigators, solid information about his fate remains elusive, in large part because of obstructions by the Bashar al-Assad regime. The Assad Government repeatedly denied holding Tice.
The files that the Tice family showed at today’s event included raw intelligence documents, information collected from various sources over the years but are uncorroborated.
Information that is considered credible by US intelligence agencies is generally designated with a level of confidence that influences the weight it should be given in decision-making.
Since the Assad regime collapsed in December, the “low-confidence” CIA assessment – which the family disputes – is that Tice is dead.
Debra Tice shared several pieces of information on her son’s case that she said she learned from reviewing the intelligence files.
Soon after Tice disappeared, she said, the Syrian Government attempted to send him back to the US.
“The Syrian Government reached out to Hillary Clinton and wanted her to come and get Austin in … August of 2012, and she declined,” she said.
The family didn’t provide documents at the event to support the claim that the then-US secretary of state refused to bring Austin Tice home days after he disappeared.
Two former US officials with knowledge of the case said that no such offer was ever made and that the Syrian Government never even acknowledged holding Tice to the US Government.
“In fact, they vigorously denied any knowledge of Austin right to the end,” one former official said.
The Tice family said that between the Trump Administration’s decision to grant them access to classified intelligence documents and the collapse of the Assad government, there has been a flood of new information on the case over the past year.
Debra Tice said the new information has only fuelled her determination to maintain attention on her son’s case.
“We know Austin is alive. We need to find him,” she said.
The last visual proof of life of Austin Tice was a video that emerged weeks after he disappeared showing him blindfolded and held by armed men.
The video quickly aroused suspicions that it was manufactured to intentionally mislead, making it appear as though Islamist militants had captured him.
After the fall of Assad, the Tice family hoped that as Syria’s network of repressive detention centres crumbled, new information about their son’s case would be unearthed.
But after thousands of people were released from Assad regime prisons across the country, Tice did not emerge.
