And in other American soft hostage news...

There's not much in the news about detained Iranian-American academic Haleh Esfandiari today. The third woman detained with them has not yet been identified.

Hillary Clinton is deeply concerned at the inexplicable detention.

Huh. WaPo is calling them 'soft hostages'. As did the LA Times.

I wonder if Robert Levinson the ex FBI guy that disappeared off the Isle of Kish is feeling like a "soft hostage" right about now? His fate remains a mystery. (Let me tell you - I get taken hostage and you refer to me as a "soft hostage"? When I get out? I'm coming after you and we're going to have a little talk.)

But back to our hostages. Is referring to them as soft hostages supposed to make us feel good about the situation? Good grief! Why would we want to have dealings with a regime that institutionalizes kidnapping and makes it part of their strategic arsenal? A strategic arsenal that will soon include nuclear weapons.

That's nice, real nice.

All this talk of hostages makes me wonder how our missing GI's are doing over in Iraq. Will the WaPo and the LA Times will be referring to them as 'hard hostages'? Al Qaeda is calling them Crusader soldiers and hearing this did not give me a warm and fuzzy feeling:

US commanders said that a nearby unit had heard the explosions and tried to communicate with the ambushed patrol, without success. An unmanned spotter drone flew overhead 15 minutes later and saw the burning vehicles but a coalition Quick Reaction Force did not reach the scene until 5.40am, nearly an hour later.

“In the United States military we have a thing called the soldier’s creed, and it says ‘I will never leave a fallen comrade’,” Major-General William Caldwell, a US military spokesman, said in Baghdad.

Undermanned, says Scott of Town Commons in his Bad news out of Iraq. Now we hear that the Quick Reaction Force didn't arrive for an hour. Not good.

Where is the rest of that surge?

Faster please.