The 10 jailed Baptists in Haiti were warned [repeatedly]

A power outage reportedly prevents Haitian Prosecutor Josephe Manes Louis from delivering to the judge his now-completed recommendations regarding whether to release 10 Baptists who were arrested for child trafficking. Sad though their plight is, they were warned, repeatedly:

• The night before the 10 entered Haiti, journalist and social activist Anne-christine d'Adesky told the group's leader, Laura Silsby, that her plan to collect 100 Haitian children and take them to the Dominican Republic was illegal and would be regarded as child trafficking.
• Dominican consul general Carlos Castillo told CNN:

  I warned her, I said as soon as you get there without the proper documents, you are going to get into trouble, because they are going to accuse you, because you have the intent to pass the border without the proper papers and they are going to accuse you with kids trafficking.

• A Haitian police officer told CNN that he stopped the Americans on Jan. 26 as they tried to take a bus of 40 children out of the country.
• Dixie Bickel, director of God's Littlest Children orphanage in Thomasin, Haiti, told the Miami Herald that Silsby disregarded her warnings about trying to swoop in after the earthquake and haul Haitian children off to the Dominican Republic.

Their arrest was tragic but not, as Southern Baptist Convention Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission chief Richard Land claims, "outrageous." More recently, he has reportedly become thankful for "whatever the US govt did" to free the 10." Land, however, dwells in an alternate reality where the U.S. is "winning" a war in Iraq, telling Southern Baptist state newspaper editors, "that's not something you're reading about."

Failures of due diligence can have a very high price indeed.