A scene from Alaska’s Tongass National Forest. Photo © Alice Tallmadge
In the past several months, much has happened in FSEEE’s efforts to vindicate Tongass wildlife biologist Glen Ith. Glen passed away unexpectedly on March 3, 2008. In a first-of-its-kind ruling, the federal district court in Anchorage allowed Glen’s wife, Marketa, to substitute for him as plaintiff in Glen’s lawsuit challenging the Scott Peak timber sale old-growth forest logging.
Marketa’s role as a plaintiff now clears the way for the court to decide whether the Forest Service violated the law when it dismissed Glen’s Scott Peak appeal on the grounds that Glen used his own wildlife resource report to bolster his arguments. We believe Glen’s report was a matter of public record—the Forest Service asserts that the report was secret and replaced it with a report that reached pro-timber conclusions.
Glen was acting in the public interest. He should have been honored for being conscientious, following the law and caring deeply about the wildlife he was charged with studying.
Government whistleblowers should not have to be martyrs. It is critical that we find out who within the government retaliated against Glen and hold them accountable. The message has to be loud and clear—if you aid or abet retaliation against a whistleblower, you will be punished.
Glen’s death led the Office of Special Counsel, which had been investigating his claims of Forest Service retaliation, to close its file. It’s no secret that under the Bush Administration the OSC has been a mockery of justice; in the last 5 years there were more than 600 cases in which civil servants reported fraud, waste and abuse to the OSC and every case was dismissed. But the OSC is a mandatory stepping-stone that federal employees have to touch on their way to federal court.
As further proof of the OSC’s lack of ethics, two dozen FBI agents raided the OSC’s offices in May in response to a probe that found the OSC head and Bush-appointee Scott Bloch had hired an outside contractor to wipe his computers’ hard discs clean of incriminating evidence. The OSC’s second in command, James Byrne, summed up the corruption in his resignation letter to Bloch:
“Upon my departure, I am obligated to note that the mission, independence, and very existence of the Office of Special Counsel are—and shall remain—at risk unless and until this agency is afforded a presidentially appointed, senate confirmed leader who is capable of putting OSC’s mission and OSC’s people ahead of political agendas and personal vendettas.”
The bottom line is that brave, ethical federal employees have no formal legal recourse when they suffer retaliation. That’s why FSEEE and Marketa Ith seek your help to implement a smart strategy that will:
prove that her husband Glen was retaliated against;
determine exactly who was involved in that retaliation; and
punish those involved.
We’ve already completed the first step in our strategy, and it yielded invaluable information. Using the Freedom of Information Act, we have uncovered more than 1,000 pages of Forest Service documents that shed light on the retaliation waged by the Forest Service against Glen. From these documents we’ve learned two key things. First, Undersecretary of Agriculture Mark Rey knew about and approved the Forest Service’s actions against Glen. Here’s what Tongass district ranger Patty Grantham wrote:
“This action was taken [against Glen] to protect both the interests of the government and Glen, to avoid exposure to sensitive litigation-related discussions or work products. It has the support all the way to the Department [U.S. Dept. of Agriculture’s Mark Rey] and OGC/DOJ [Office of General Counsel and Department of Justice].”
To put this statement into context, Glen filed his first environmental lawsuit against the Forest Service, challenging illegal road building for unapproved timber sales, on March 27, 2006. Two weeks later, the Forest Service removed Glen from his position and reassigned him to a make-work job. (Click here to see the full text of the memo reassigning Glen).
The Whistleblower Protection Act states clearly that the government cannot reassign an employee because he blows the whistle on agency law-breaking. Yet that’s exactly what the Forest Service admits it did.
Making matters worse for Glen, he went on to win his lawsuit challenging the illegal road building. In fact, the Forest Service’s lawyers were forced to concede in open court that their client had broken the law. The only thing more irritating to a government bureaucracy than a whistleblower is a whistleblower that is right.
In our current investigation of the government’s retaliation against Glen, although they released more than 1,000 pages, they withheld 700 additional pages. The Forest Service claims that these documents are exempt from release because they are attorney/client communications. Normally, the discussions you have with your lawyer are private and, if you end up in court, you need not disclose them to the other side. But there’s an important exception. If you and your lawyer are breaking the law or engaged in misconduct, you lose the privilege of keeping your information secret.
And that’s exactly the case here. These 700 pages of secret documents were all created as a part of the Forest Service’s retaliatory scheme taken against Glen because he held his employer accountable to our nation’s environmental protection laws. The Whistleblower Protection Act says that it is illegal for the government to retaliate against employees who blow the whistle. Since the 700 pages were created as a part of the Forest Service’s illegal retaliation, they are not entitled to any claims of confidentiality.
In fact, one of the documents we obtained shows the Forest Service knew better all along. In another memorandum by Patty Grantham (now supervisor of the Klamath National Forest in California—loyalty to the bureaucracy is rewarded), she writes:
“I realize that there is probably opinion out there that says the provisions of the Whistleblower Act trump all of this stuff . . . .”
It’s clear that Glen’s superiors knew that their false accusations against Glen were being made in violation of the Whistleblower Protection Act, but that didn’t stop them from continuing to retaliate against him.
The government’s improper withholding of the key documents that show who did what in retaliation against Glen gives us our best chance to vindicate him. As we pursue these documents by filing a new federal court lawsuit, we will be able to put on our case that the government engaged in an illegal conspiracy of retaliation against Glen. If we prove that the retaliation occurred, the government’s claim of privilege evaporates—it cannot be used to shield from release documents showing illegal government misconduct.
This will be a first-of-its-kind lawsuit and you can be sure the government will fight hard to keep its conspiracy against Glen hidden. We need all the help we can get—especially financial assistance to cover our court costs, travel and other expenses of federal litigation. We also need to continue keeping the pressure on Congress; pressure that will only grow as we uncover more documentary evidence of the illegal retaliation against Glen.
The best legacy Glen’s untimely death can have is “never again.”
Never again should a Forest Service worker be subjected to the harassment and retaliation Glen suffered at the hands of the Forest Service. Never again should those who harass be allowed to hide behind a veil of secrecy or get promotions because they are more loyal to the bureaucracy than to the public interest.
Thanks so much for your help to ensure that this harassment and retaliation never happens again.
P.S. You can make a donation to this project by clicking on “DONATE NOW!” in the upper left-hand column, then clicking on “Hold the Government Accountable for Retaliation Against Public Servants.”
