It really is one of most peculiar things I’ve seen of late.  One moment, Julian Assange is a suspect for rape and molestation charges, “arrested in abstentia” by Swedish authorities, because they don’t know where he is.  The next day, the arrest warrant is revoked for lack of evidence.

So what’s going on here?  Well, over the course of the last couple days, I’ve considered three theories:

• It’s one heck of promotion campaign by Assange, who plans to release the last 15,000 Afghanistan documents Wikileaks has in its possession.
• It’s a smear campaign put on by the U.S. government in hopes of rallying up ill will toward Assange, possibly for the same reason as above.
• It’s neither, and somebody was looking for attention.
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This analysis is brought to you by Stratfor.com: the best online intelligence community.

Obama’s Plan and the Key Battleground
By George Friedman

U.S. President Barack Obama announced the broad structure of his Afghanistan strategy in a speech at West Point on Tuesday evening. The strategy had three core elements.| MORE ›

By George Friedman and Reva Bhalla.

The decision over whether to send more U.S. troops into Afghanistan may wait until the contested Afghan election is resolved, U.S. officials said Oct. 18. The announcement comes as U.S. President Barack Obama is approaching a decision on the war in Afghanistan.| MORE ›

U.S. President Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize last week.| MORE ›

The Washington Post published an op-ed yesterday written by Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal. Read it; it’s a good one.

Jindal believes that Republicans have to join the “battle of ideas” about health care reform. Reform, he says, is necessary.

He first gets a dig in at Democrats:

The debate on health care has moved on.| MORE ›

In addition to being an overwhelming human tragedy, the earthquake in Haiti is exposing a serious policy problem — international aid does not address the real problem of weak states: A lack of infrastructure.

Read the whole article at the new site, Unscripted Rationalism

I just finished reading Michael van der Galien’s article about maintaining the free press in America.  I watched Glenn Beck’s segment on net neutrality.  And for a while I’ve been following the arguments both for and against the idea of legislating net neutrality.  Frankly, I’m split on the subject.| MORE ›

This commentary is by Robert Ellis

Like Ireland, Cyprus has been a victim of geography and both are today still divided. As the Arab geographer Muqaddasi wrote in 985: “The island of Qubrus is in the power of whichever nation is overlord in these seas”. And with its position 40 miles off the southern coast of Turkey and 70 miles from Syria it has been a strategic prize for centuries.| MORE ›

I’ve been reading the exchanges between Andrew Breitbart and Conor Friedersdorf (who has now written a response to Breitbart’s rebuttal from yesterday).  My problem with Conor’s initial article is that he appears to want Breitbart’s ventures to be more like the New York Times, or at least how the Times is presents itself to the public.  That is:| MORE ›

Although they only broke the news this week, Western intelligence agencies did in fact know about Iran’s second nuclear facility for years. The LA Times, Fox News and Newsweek all say they discovered the reactor located near Qom in 2006.

Meanwhile, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad does not quite understand the outrage he caused.| MORE ›