Buried in Practice

What became of the US State Department's human rights investigation into Freeport-McMoRan in West Papua, Indonesia?

Eyewitness reports of killings near Freeport-McMoRan's Grasberg mine in West Papua, Indonesia-alleging company involvement-reached Washington. The State Department opened a human rights investigation-then the report vanished from public view.

In this second volume of Archives of a Wall Street Analyst, former Wall Street mining analyst John Wilson follows the paper trail through cables, press reporting, and more than a decade of FOIA requests and litigation-asking what the State Department found, and why the report still has not surfaced.

He widens the lens to "development aggression": the recurring machinery by which remote extractive projects become zones of coercion, security force violence, displacement, environmental harm, and narrowed Indigenous consent. Reviewing thirty comparative case studies, Wilson shows recurring patterns of allegations, denials, and moral trade-offs repeating across borders and legal systems-revealing how social and political costs are externalized when extraction meets weak oversight and high strategic value.

Wilson also places his own story alongside the archive. After publishing a March 1996 analyst report on Freeport that touched on human rights and political risk, the FBI targeted him with surveillance, workplace interference, attempted entrapment, and intrusion into his personal and professional life. Later disclosures by FBI operatives reveal the motive and extent of the retribution.â

Part narrative, part documentary archive, this volume invites readers to test the evidence-and decide what a missing report reveals about power, accountability, and who pays the price.