Maybe I'm naive, but I really think these people were clueless. Not that is defensible, but these people don't seem all that bright.

The children, some of them sick and dehydrated, were taken to an orphanage run by Austrian-based SOS Children's Villages, which was trying to find their parents or close relatives, said a spokesman there, George Willeit.

"One child, an 8- or 9-year-old, said she thought she was going to some sort of summer or vacation camp in the Dominican Republic," Willeit said.

The Baptist group planned to scoop up 100 kids and take them by bus to a 45-room hotel at Cabarete, a beach resort in the Dominican Republic, that they were converting into an orphanage, Silsby told the AP.

Whether they realized it or not, these Americans — the first known to be taken into custody since the Jan. 12 quake — put themselves in the middle of a firestorm in Haiti, where government leaders have suspended adoptions amid fears that parentless or lost children are more vulnerable than ever to child trafficking.

------------

Social Affairs Minister Yves Cristallin told the AP that the Americans were suspected of taking part in an illegal adoption scheme.

Hilarious.

Haitian authorities said police had arrested five men and five women with US passports, as well as two Haitians, as they tried to cross into the neighboring Dominican Republic with 33 children late Friday.

Border police "saw a bus with a lot of children. Thirty-three children. When asked about the children's documents, they had no documents," Haitian Culture and Communications Minister Marie Laurence Jocelyn Lassegue said.

Social Affairs Minister Yves Christallin identified the Americans as members of an Idaho-based charity called New Life Children's Refuge. "This is an abduction, not an adoption," he said.

Some of the older children had spoken to aid workers and "say their parents are alive, and some of them gave us an address and phone numbers," said Patricia Vargas, head of an international center caring for the youngsters.

Vargas said officials at the Haitian Institute of Social Welfare, which deals with adoptions, told her "most of the kids have family."

The church group's own mission statement said it planned to spend only hours in the devastated capital, quickly identifying children without immediate families and busing them to a rented hotel in the Dominican Republic without bothering to get permission from the Haitian government.

Whatever their intentions, other child welfare organizations in Haiti called the plan reckless.

"The instinct to swoop in and rescue children may be a natural impulse but it cannot be the solution for the tens of thousands of children left vulnerable by the Haiti earthquake," said Deb Barry, a protection expert at Save the Children, which wants a moratorium on new adoptions. "The possibility of a child being scooped up and mistakenly labeled an orphan in the chaotic aftermath of the disaster is incredibly high."

------

The children, ages 2 months to 12 years old, were taken to an orphanage run by Austrian-based SOS Children's Villages, where spokesman George Willeit said they arrived "very hungry, very thirsty."

A 2- to 3-month old baby was dehydrated and had to be hospitalized, he said.

"One (8-year-old) girl was crying, and saying, 'I am not an orphan. I still have my parents.' And she thought she was going on a summer camp or a boarding school or something like that," Willeit said.

The orphanage was working to reunite the children with their families, joining a concerted effort by the Haitian government, the United Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross and other NGOs.

Willeit said a woman from the group had spent time in Port-au-Prince prior to the quake winning the trust of people in a neighborhood whose children were taken.

-----

As the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, Haiti is in a difficult spot — it needs aid, but deeply resents foreign meddling. Many have mixed feelings toward Christian groups that funnel hundreds of millions into missions in Haiti.

"There are many who come here with religious ideas that belong more in the time of the inquisition," said Max Beauvoir, head of Haiti's Voodoo Priest's Association, which represents thousands of priests and priestesses. "These types of people believe they need to save our souls and our bodies from ourselves. We need compassion, not proselytizing now, and we need aid — not just aid going to people of the Christian faith."

Two-thirds of Haiti's 9 million are said to practice Voodoo, a melange of beliefs from parts of west Africa and Catholicism.

It reminds me of our own history in taking Native American children away from their parents and sending them to boarding schools.