Just hit CNN to see this disaster in the making. Apparently, insurgents have nabbed two of our soldiers.

"There are intelligence indicators [that] they may have been captured alive rather than killed," a senior military official told CNN on Saturday night.

One U.S. soldier was killed in the attack, and a massive search was under way Saturday for the two who are unaccounted for.

The paper cited Iraqis in the area, who were interviewed by telephone from Baghdad, as saying the attack appeared to have been intended to lure some soldiers away and separate the force.

Clearly a new tactic, and a nasty one. While I can't help thinking it would have been better if we were better custodians of our captives in Abu Ghraib, I doubt if it would have made any difference in how these two soldiers will be treated. After all, these Al Qaeda jackasses (if that's who is behind this) made their names beheading journalists on television. There is no question they will not show any form of decency with their captives just because they're soldiers.

I guess I just feel a loss of moral superiority considering the horrible things we've done in the name of fighting terror. We won't be able to point to our handling of prisoners and say we're angels and demand quarter for our troops, for a lot of the same reasons described in the post below about how people form perceptions of things. Abu Ghraib probably was an anomaly, but when people think of the US in Iraq they'll always remember an image of a pile of naked men with some idiot giving the thumbs up to the camera. I suppose if we had done better we would have enjoyed more sympathy from the world now that the insurgents have captured US soldiers. It's not like you're going to convince the sociopaths with better treatment of our prisoners, but we could have done a better job convincing the normals who support the sociopaths.

Maybe I'm being too pessimistic, they still might find them before it's too late.