Next, deborah tice spoke about her son, austin, who has been detained in syria for 11 years. The discussion focused on journalists detained internationally and strategies the u. S. Government can use to bring them home. This conversation was hosted by the National Press club and runs an hour and 15 minutes. Of and s one hour 15 minutes. Will do that. Well do that. Good morning, everyone. Im eileen oreilly, president of the National Press club, managing editor of standards and training at axios. Today we meet in a light filled comfortable room surrounded by friends and colleagues. 6000 miles away, austin tice is marking his 11th year away from family, friends, and colleagues and is likely not in a comfortable situation. He was doing very important journalism, covering what was happening in syria when he was taken august 14 of 2012 and has not yet been freed. This is a tragedy of unthinkable proportion. Let us pause for a minute to give our thoughts to austin and his family today. Thank you. That one minute seemed to take forever, didnt it . Just imagine how the 11 years or roughly 5,781,600 minutes felt to austin. Today we have to do some good for him in this case by doing something for his beloved profession, journalism. While american hostages are coming home, journalists being held hostage or not. Today we have a panel to address the issues around that today we have a panel to address the issues around that problem and make recommendations. There has been some progress in his case since he was taken but he is still not home. Home. Before we start the panel i would like to introduce someone representing a strong force for press freedom. Executive editor of the washington post, sally busby. Some of the progress in his case has come as a result of the massive and effective ad campaign by the press Freedom Partnership of the post under the leadership of fred ryan. Last year he addressed the idea and busby is taking up the mantle, kind enough to stop by and say a few words. Thank you for joining, sally. [applause] sally good morning. Thank you, eileen. Thank you to everyone on the panel. Thank you to the National Press club for hosting the event. Its great and meaningful to see all of you joining in support of austin. I obviously want to call out our colleagues at mcclatchy, very nice have you here. On behalf of all of his colleagues, our house our hearts go out to all members of the ibew of the tice family. What you have endured is unfathomable. We stand with you today and everyday in calling on the u. S. Government to press forward and make good on the promise to secure his release from syria. As a part of our press Freedom Partnership we have run a sustained campaign over the years to support austin. Fullpage photos showing awareness of his situation to keep him in the publics i and hold accountable eye and hold accountable those who have the power to bring him home. Today we talk about substantive, practical, real ways progress can be made. We are grateful that progress today is focused on substance in this way. Keeping him front and center in the attention of the public and in the attention of the government officials is critical and we hope that deborah, mark, and the entire tice family know that we will continue to stand by them and that they are in our hearts august 14 and every day of the year and we pledge our campaign will continue until austin is home and we will be unrelenting until that happens and we look forward to the day when this gathering of his friends, family, colleagues and supporters can be a celebration of his return. Thank you so much. [applause] eileen thank you, sally. Thank you to our interim publisher for continuing that significant support by the post for their reporter, austin tice. Austin did great work for mcclatchy and many in the mcclatchy family are here today or are with us on the livestream, thank you for your support as well. [applause] publisher tony hunter cannot join us today but last year he was here to highlight the event. We know he feels the same today. Now i will turn it over to bill mccarron to introduce our panel for the day to look at the challenges Government Faces when the hostages they are trying to free our journalists. First i want to say hi and thank you for coming to deborah tice, austins mom, here today all the way from texas. I know that this is a particularly tough day for you and your family. I want you to hear it from all 3000 members of us that we are here for you today and every day and we will continue to be here until we get austin home. Thank you. Eileen of course. Thanks, eileen. We are going to go through the panel. But given that this is the 14th of august and what it means, we wanted to start with deborah, who i think has traveled the furthest to be here in both practical and spiritual ways. You have a statement . Deborah i do, i have a statement. Im going to stand up. Do you want to podium . Deborah i want to stand up. Go ahead, hes got you. Debra thank you. I want to start with how glad i am that you are here. I just have to tell you that the agreement that you and fred ryan made to Work Together to bring evan and austin home has really made a significant distance difference for austin. I appreciate that camaraderie, especially in light of the fact that you guys are so different and your news is so different and its just beautiful to see that you can Work Together for these men. Thank you. [applause] now i would like to speak to our president. President biden, it is encouraging to see the pragmatic approach of the United States in its effort to secure the release of u. S. Hostages. The negotiation and return of assets to their original owners in order to achieve the return of hostages is a positive development. Such pragmatism, recognizing the interests of all parties has a proven history of being the best way forward. Today austin tice, my son, has been held captive in syria for 11 years. He deserves this pragmatic vision and effort that has been deployed for the iranian hostages. Mr. President , actions speak louder than words. Show me. Show austin that he has value to you and to his country. That he is worth bringing home. I implore you, reject a hollow posturing. Deploy the effective pragmatic policy in syria and bring austin home for the holidays. [applause] its bill thank you, debra. That was wonderful. We hope President Biden is listening and indeed, this special breakthrough that happened over the last week we hope it can have meaning for both austins case and others. The iran question that debra was addressing, that news came up after we planned this event. Still in some ways fresh. Do you want to give us your thoughts today . First i want to take a moment to help us try to wrap our heads around what 11 years was like. I had been working at the post for a handful of months when austin was taken hostage in 2012. 23 months later, i was taken hostage along with my wife, arrested at gunpoint from our home, thrown in prison in iran, where i spent a year and a half. My colleagues at the National Press club, the post, and a whole community of friends, family, and colleagues around the world fought relentlessly for my freedom. It took a year and a half. We look back at that as sort of the best Case Scenario in these cases. Which is not good enough. Its actually pretty darn terrible. After a year and a half of convalescing, almost two years after my return, i return to fulltime work at the washington post. I remember taking the bus to work one day, sitting next to a woman on the bet on the bus. On her backpack she had a free austin tice pin on her backpack and i started to weep and she said sir, whats wrong. I said i used to be the name on one of those pins. That was almost six years ago. In the time since, i have had a child. Hes almost three. I have moved three times. I have been afforded the opportunity to live my life. Austin deserves that opportunity. Hed deserved that opportunity for every day of the last 11 years and he will continue to deserve it until he comes home. My considerations on this are not whether the points of a deal are good or in someones favor or not. My position is that im thankful i live in a country and does o bring us home. So far, they failed often and continue to fail often. And that is not a secret. It is time to do better. It has been far too long that these five americans have been held in iran. During all of that time, austin has been waiting to come home. Paul beckett, we are so glad to have you here today. Paul is the bureau chief for the wall street journal and the Evan Gershkovich case. What we are going to try to get to today is that one of the things we have in common is that they are cases of journalists being held and other special problems that need to be addressed. Why dont you start about telling us where you think evans cases today. Thank you. We appreciate everything you have been doing to raise awareness of this issue. Between the three of you, the National Press club, the posts efforts, we do have other track records to build on and that has been an extraordinary source of very good advice, very good, very helpful guidance and support since march 29, so the few months we have been dealing with this. The one thing that makes journalists exceptional in this regard is the environment of community that has been built up through austins case, through jasons case. I think that is very good in keeping awareness high. If you are asking what is different about journalists in these cases, journalists are going to be by nature higher profile. The regimes that take journalists take them for a reason. They stand for things that the people who capture them do not respect. We automatically as journalists become symbolic in addition to a tangible hostage asset that someone in any walk of life saved the military or diplomacy, we become targets and we become valuable targets and i think that presents a difficult conundrum for any government trying to secure their release because they become symbolic of it is typically dictatorships that take hostages and a free press is anathema to dictatorships. You very quickly get spun up into a very meaningful much more. This is governments taken americans hostage for leverage and anticipate again. I do think journalists occupy a special position to some degree. But i also think winning against that is the fact that there is a huge amount of Institutional Support for this kind of thing. It is incumbent upon all of us to figure out what more we can do, what pressure we can bring to bear, how we can get the government even more focused on this. Perhaps we are new enough to this, the response has been very receptive obviously as in all of these cases, we would like to see action, but i think there are complicated factors here. In addition to the symbolic value, there is a practical aspect to this. When evan is in russia and writing about russia, this is fuel for americans understanding of the world. For us to have a participatory democracy, the citizens need to be informed. When you take a journalist, you are cutting down on the ability our way of life to function. I will make one of her general comment about cases of journalism. Particularly in early days of austens case, journalists are very reluctant to cover themselves. They do not want to be the story and that extends to journalists who were taken hostage. In jasons case, it was like, how much is too much . With austins case, covers would be centered around anniversary dates. I think the journal has done an outstanding job of keeping the story going, but i know it is an issue between the people who are writing the news of day stories and the general newsroom, which is advocating strongly for evan. These are all issues. They are hard to resolve. I do not know if they are always recognized in the culture of the newsroom or in the government. We have one more panelists. That is sonya smith. Are you there . Yes, i am here. She is on what i think would be a vacation, except she has a threemonthold and a threeyearold. But we are glad you can join us today. If you do not know sonja or her work, she has written two of the most important pieces of journalism about austin tices case. She did Exhaustive Research and travel. I recommend them to you. We handed them out last year. One of the things i am surprised about is that when i talk to people in journalism about his case, they are not aware of these stories. And i think that is also true by and large of government. It is surprising to me. Let me ask you this question. You write some stuff about the fish and wildlife service. When you do a cracking story about that, what happens . I did a story a couple of years ago about a few whooping cranes that had been killed in texas and had developed a source that was very responsive and reaches out. With the austin tice story, there has been nothing but silence. So your phone rings when you write about whooping cranes, but when you write about austin tice, you do not hear from your government or from your colleagues in journalism. That sounds about fear. Fair. In one of your pieces, you discuss the important fall 2020 meeting in damascus between representatives of the u. S. Government and representatives of the government of syria. Raise your hand if you know what i am talking about. About half of the hands went up. In that story that you wrote, why dont you tell us what you think are the important outcomes. I wrote a story last year about the 10th anniversary of austins capture. Catching up on the piece from 2015. In the piece from last year, i reached out to lebanons security chief. He is the person who brokered that meeting in damascus between Roger Carstens from the white house hostage affairs. When i spoke to him last summer, they note told me something that had not been reported elsewhere. That they would provide proof of life of austin. [indiscernible] those talks ultimately stalled out. What i found interesting is the american presence in that meeting never told his family that they had offered to provide proof of life. Yes, was conditional. The big question is why keep that from them . Who benefits . Thank you. The audio is a little rough. The u. S. Government meets with the Syrian Government. The Syrian Government offers proof of life with conditions and this is news. Mrs. Tice finds this out from the article. They did not offer proof of life, they promised to offer proof of life, which is one step of proof of life. Still information that should go to the family. Yes. Does not go to the family and does not make a big impact in journalism in general. One of the problems we have in austins case is that you cannot see austin. We can see evan occasionally. And we know his zip code. Here is an important ingredient to how people think, feel and are mobilized about this case that is withheld. The question i get from citizens all the time and think you all for not asking mrs. Tice this question, how do you know he is alive . This is syria drop in at the front door a proxy answer to that question and it is withheld from the bloodstream of the conversation. And it is withheld from debras heart. And it is something we only know because we know it through journalism. When we are looking at the problem of what are the special issues related to journalists being held hostage, i would say this is one of them. That for whatever reason, the decisions made by the government on which information to share, is ratcheted up when the family or the company is one of journalism rather than something else. And getting past that is something we have to explore. Recognizing that it is a problem is step one. We asked many people in government to participate today. I understand nobody wanted to be here. Getting up this problem starts with recognition on behalf of the government that there is a problem. I think they would officially say we treat every hostage case the same. I do not think that is the case. There are some benefits journalists might get, but there is more downside, particularly when you look at things like this. Anybody else want to sonja, thank you. We will come back to you a couple more times. Did you want to say anything . Ok. Anyone else have thoughts on this discussion of the problem of trying to get information forward to hostage families when the hostage is attached to a journalism enterprise. At the beginning, they would not share anything with us about austin because he is an emancipated adult and he did not give them permission to speak with us. We had to jump that hurdle and get security clearance. I met going to name names, but a top guy in the fbi told me it would take more than a year and a half and cost 100,000 to try to get security clearance to try to find out about austin. There was not even a grain of truth in that. After having a really rigorous conversation with me on the phone, he refused to work on the case anymore or to have anything to do with it. Just that first step, who else are you going to tell . He is not married. He has not given this permission to anyone. So is this your way of keeping your secret . And why would you keep it secret . And thanks be to god that the Czech Republic ambassador in damascus could not really get anything going with the state department in the United States and so she went to prague and she went on the news and had their news man asked her, what can you tell us about the journalist austin tice . God bless her soul, she said he was detained at a checkpoint in syria. And so we no longer had to be under this do not tell anyone that austin is missing, keep this quiet. Why do they want to keep this quiet . Because if we are quiet, it is one less thing they have to deal with. And that is the only motive and it is disgusting. And that is part of what president obama was addressing in 2015, that with a new hostage enterprise was trying to resolve some of these issues about how families are treated in this kind of a situation. For the seven or eight years that i have been watching, there has been some change in the culture and the information sharing with families and with journalists about other journalists and other types of hostages. There is a bit more trust there, but that does not solve the problem right now. It is a work in progress and we have dozens of americans being held hostage right now. We often have a culture that anyone coming in and we are 11 years, you cannot imagine the turnover in the people we have worked with in 11 years. The longer we are in this, the more people feel like, i am not sure i feel comfortable about all of this sharing. And so they have to be trained, it is the parents, it is austin s