Posted on 02/09/2010 3:25:48 AM PST by SkyPilot
Port-au-Prince, Haiti (CNN) -- The group of American missionaries in Haiti facing kidnapping charges for trying to take 33 children out of the country last week made an earlier, unsuccessful attempt at taking dozens of other children, a Haitian police officer said Monday.
Laura Silsby, left, and two other members of her missionary group are seen after a recent court hearing in Haiti.
The officer did not want to be identified for fear of reprisals. He told CNN that he had stopped the 10 Baptist missionaries, including group leader Laura Silsby, on January 26 as they tried to transport 40 children on a bus from Haiti to the Dominican Republic.
The officer said he discovered Silsby and the nine other Americans on a bus in the Port-au-Prince neighborhood of Petionville in the early afternoon of January 26 after receiving a tip from a concerned citizen.
He stopped the group and ordered the children to get off the bus. He then directed Silsby to the Dominican embassy.
"I said what happened, and she (Silsby) told me, 'I have the paperwork to cross the Haitian Dominican border with 100 children,' " the officer said. A former attorney for the group, Edwin Coq, said the officer has testified of his account.
The officer was questioned by prosecutors last week in the case against the missionaries. Prosecutors no longer suspect him of any wrongdoing, and he is now a witness, according Coq, who is familiar with the prosecution's case file.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
Having adopted internationally three separate times from countries much like Haiti, I would say I probably know a great deal more about this than you do.
Gaining permission to take a child from a parent under duress like the post-earthquake life in Haiti right now
is predatory.
Trafficking in children. You don't anywhere take a child across an international border without a passport at least.
I have children from several different countries and before they had US passports, we never got through a border crossing without having to pull over and go in for a longish discussion.
That's Canada, and with passports.
And mine were legally adopted. So what makes what this woman did ok? Just because there was an earthquake?
Why not feed the kids and help them IN Haiti?
Because she was kidnapping them, not helping them.
Check into the costs of international adoption for more education.
Total Cost: $23,300-$30,450 (for 2 people traveling)
Bethany Fees: $5,400-$10,250 (vary by Bethany branch)
Haiti Country Fee: $12,000
Haiti Travel: $3,200-$5,200
Miscellaneous: $2,700-$3,000
So let's see, 33 children times 12 grand is... about $400,000 grand.
That's one hefty load of potential cash she was trying to get across the border.
"According to SOS co-workers in Santo, the children were distressed, hungry and thirsty."
""But I am not an orphan", told an eight-year-old girl. She thought that her mother has arranged short holidays for her. Some of these children obviously still have parents who assumedly were persuaded to hand over their children under false pretenses."
Yet in quite a few places I have read that the children are confused, hurt, and upset - their own mothers were talked into relinquishing them by/to a set of Americans she had never met before, with the help of a flyer that promised things that were not necessarily in place.
And yet you would see her take a busload of children across an international border with no oversight by anyone, and cheer her on, because she uses the word "Christian" to describe herself.
By one account she did not even know the names of the children.
The "signed permission" they had was from a Haitian pastor who lives in Georgia and had no connection at all to most of the children found on the bus, and of course no authority whatsoever to grant anyone permission to take the children out of the country. He's crazy as a loon and gave CBS an interview from Georgia, saying there shouldn't have been any problem with taking the children out of Haiti because he'd given Silsby a signed note saying it was okay.
The only source for the other two claims is Laura Silsby and members of her group who got the information from her, some of whom repeated it in media interviews. Dominican Republic officials have repeatedly denied they gave her any sort of documentation, and Silsby has been unable to produce or describe any such documents, or name who she supposedly got them from -- but it really doesn't matter because obviously the DR government cannot authorize removal of Haitian children from Haiti, and that's what the group is charged with.
The "just lacked one document" claim is a pure Silsby fabrication, but apparently one which she told to her group, and at least one of them repeated it to a relative back in the US during a phone call. At a bare minimum, she was lacking 33 passports, 33 birth certificates, and 33 removal authorizations which required the signature of the prime minister. Nobody had any intention of providing her with any passports or birth certificates, and the prime minister certainly had no intention of providing her with his signature on documents authorizing the removal of any children. Her attempt to give the impression that there were just some minor paper details that weren't in order is unrelated to reality.
As for people handing over their children to Silsby's groups because they couldn't feed them, it's worth noting that Silsby and her group weren't offering to feed them, though they were showing pictures of resort-like properties the children would supposedly be taken to, even though the group had no reasonable expectation of being able to pay for such facilities. Silsby also told parents the children would attend school, but she had no teachers and no money to hire teachers, as well as no physical facility or money to acquire a physical facility. With the amount of money Silsby was promising to pay (not paying, just promising) the Catholic diocese in the DR each month for temporary rental of their hotel, she could have fed all these children *and* their families for several months. But she wasn't interested in keeping these families together or feeding them -- she was interested in acquiring the children for fundraising purposes.
You weren’t there so you don’t know jack squat about it. And you seem to be forgetting that there’d just been a shattering earthquake of epic proportions there that’s connected to this incident in a hugely significant way.
Anyway, you’ve become silly, so don’t bother me anymore.
Haiti is not worse than Mexico in the bribery department from someone who has worked in both.
Bribery is a way of life in both nations.
One thing in Haitian favor is that the authorities are no longer complicit in murder-kidnapping rings as they are in Mexico.
Problem is there is not a whole heap of authority there.
dealing with God haters is dirty business, they always just make up salacious stuff for effect.
that said...I confess i just don’t know enough
but if I had to stack up what I personally know about Haiti from having worked there versus the downside of Silsby’s poor loan performances I’d go with Silsby by at least half a length.
I agree. I’ve said several times that we don’t know what happened or what’s going on. But now the parents have testified that they did indeed agree to let the kids go with this group for adoption, so it’s looking a lot more like the group is innocent of wrong doing. As for not having a couple of forms properly signed, it’s been reported that Haiti presently doesn’t have a facility location for those services, so I don’t think there’s even much of a case to be made against them with respect to the incomplete paperwork. A very nagging fact keeps coming to mind, and that is that these people were arrested and incarcerated almost sinultaneous to 5,000 criminals being released from the prisons and jails because the authorities couldn’t care for them and the buildings weren’t safe. But they can incarcerate these American Christians who did indeed have permission from the parents to take these kids to a better place? That doesn’t pass the smell test. Couple all that with the level of corruption and crime within the government and we’re left with no credible claim by Haiti in this matter.
I believe the National Penitentiary collapsed...it was located in urban Port Au Prince..an awful medieval place where folks died and their corpses rotted or as legend says, they were cannibalized.
I hit a rich Haitian in the nose in 1990 over money he owed me and refused to pay and had to basically run for my life to escape being placed there by his family’s goons.
You went in there and you were in trouble.
From the February 9 entry at http://andersoncooper360review.blogspot.com/ :
“But Karl also finds a boy who was forced onto the bus by his father. He didn’t even know where he was going. An attorney for the group states he was not aware of this attempt to take children. Following Karl’s piece, Anderson tells us that the little boy forced on the bus had been given toys by the Americans, but once the scheme failed, they actually asked for the toys back. How very Christian of them.”
According to this article the group refused to pay the $300/head “fee” to get the requested paperwork. They were arrested right after that.
http://www.kansascity.com/703/story/1728522.html
In an e-mail from the Idaho church that organized the mission, Keller read that the group tried three times to acquire the paperwork before they were asked to pay $300 a head for the children to cross the border. Culberth’s group refused, Keller said, and before long they were arrested.
Read more: Kansan jailed in Haiti has ‘tender heart’ - KansasCity.com
Well - good news heard on Fox tonight is that the Haiti Judge has ruled these Americans did nothing illegal and were not trying to traffic in children and they are set for release tomorrow!!!
Thanks be to God!
wonder how the Godless here feel now
GS must be crying on his ouija board
LOLOL!!!
Yes indeed. Wonder same. Haven’t looked to see if there is a thread with this headline yet....
I want to be SURE the scoffers with whom I work also hear this good news....
Hi wardaddy.
I bow to your firsthand experience on the verdict.
I was recalling Duvalier’s ton ton macoutes of some years back and supposing that at a remnant,or the memory of that era still exerts moral (amoral) influence. I also wonder if Islamists have any influence there.
I also discounted much of Mexico’s corruption thinking it limited to the northern border and connected to the drug cartels— to my mind a superimposed second government. But I guess a seperate, independent governing hierarchy is one definition of corruption.
I do take issue on one point: this seems more than mere bribery; it seems more like an officially sanctioned hostage for ransom scenario.
I think you are right but I think it the Haitians did not think it through properly.
As it appears these folks are not actually slave trade baby stealers as some here suggested hysterically, what the Haitian authorities have done is not helped themselves in the court of US public opinion.
What I can’t believe is our State Dept has kept quiet unless they thought that would help more...hard to tell.
remember Obama has been lackluster in supporting the Iranian opposition..so one never knows
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