At least now I know why my BTC was being held hostage and Coinbase was not broadcasting transactions.  Although they flat out lied to me in my support emails filled with BS.

"Really sorry about this - we're having an issue with connecting to the blockchain at the moment, causing transactions to stay in the pending state for too long. We're working on fixing it right now so you should be all good very soon - I really appreciate your patience!"

"Sorry about the delay! Due to a certain degree of randomness, sometimes pending transactions aren't picked up by the bitcoin nextwork as quickly as usual. The transaction should go through eventually - if it doesn't for 24 hours it will be automatically cancelled and you can re-initiate it.
Looks like yours went through."