Talk:Minuteman Project

I moved this page so that its title was the name of the group being described, the Minuteman Project. Titles of SourceWatch articles should be descriptive -- not editorial statements. Please see SourceWatch:Contributing and related pages for more.

best, Diane Farsetta 18:29, 11 Jul 2006 (EDT)

Tidying Page

Re name: agree. the previous tritle would only have neen appropriate if the quote was a self-description. As it wasnlt it is best changed. (Otherwise, by implication, the title of every organisation/individual could be changed to include a dismissive description of a critic which wouldnlt be in keeping with our policy aim of being fair and accurate.

I have also relocated a couple of sections off the article page. Reasons indented below the par.

"Members of a violent Central America-based gang have been sent to Arizona to target Minuteman Project volunteers, who will begin a monthlong border vigil this weekend to find and report foreigner sneaking into the United States, project officials say. "James Gilchrist, a Vietnam veteran who helped organize the vigil to protest the federal government's failure to control illegal immigration, said he has been told that California and Texas leaders of Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, have issued orders to teach 'a lesson' to the Minuteman volunteers." [1]

this is a claim that really only merits rettnion if there is some corroboration in the two years since it was made.

"Embedded" Reporting: Steven Gregory, Newstalk 550 KFYI's Investigator, reports that he is "the only Valley reporter" embedded with the Minuteman Project along the U.S.-Mexican border. Gregory's "reports" are made in a daily blog. [2]

dead link

Commentary: MMP has been called by The Rude Pundit "Armed Rednecks at the Border." April 7, 2005. The Rude Pundit writes: "When a group of armed men and (a few) women take the law into their hands in order to protect their 'homes' because they believe their government fails to do so and when that moves beyond creating gated compounds to actually confronting others, don't we usually call that 'terrorism'? 'Cause, like, isn't that what the Taliban did to take over Afghanistan?" [3]The Pundit says that "he's a little, let's say, concerned about the notion of groups of gun-wielding paranoid white people 'guarding the borders'" with the "chance to 'patrol' the Arizona wasteland at the Mexican border in desperate hopes of hog-tying Paco and Jacinta and dragging them to the Border Patrol." [4]

It is commentary and better on the talk page. In the absence of evidence of actual abuses this is speculative comment. If there have been absues they should be documented and included but otherwise, in my opinion, this doesn't add much to the profile.

Also, will shift material on Gilchrist to his own page --Bob Burton 19:59, 11 Jul 2006 (EDT)

Unsourced commentary

I removed this from the main article as it looked like direct commentary by a reader and was not sourced:

Note: Being armed is perfectly legal in the state of Arizona. As Minutemen tend to sit in lawn chairs in the middle of the desert and have a high risk of encountering coyotes (human smugglers) and drug runners with fully automatic weapons, the sidearms that members of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps are allowed to carry are minimal protection in such circumstances but any self-protection is warranted and legitimate. That being said, MANY members of the MCDC are not armed.

--Conor Kenny 15:24, 16 September 2007 (EDT)