Rich marshals several dissident sites on his server, including
Empire Burlesque,
Atlantic Free Press
(both still being restored as of this writing), and now the website of
Craig Murray, the courageous truth-teller who blew the whistle on the
atrocities and depradations of Bush's one-time "Terror War" ally,
autocrat Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan, where Murray served as UK
ambassador.
For his pains, Murray was subjected to the usual sacking and
villification by the powers-that-be. Undaunted, he has carried on
speaking out, most recently about
the Russian-Uzbek oligarch Alisher Usmanov,
the convict who has parked his lard on top of $3 billion in the usual
murkily-gotten "privatization" gains and is now ensconsced in Britain,
buying his way into a top UK soccer club, like fellow murkigarch Roman
Abramovich. (Boys and their toys; what can you do, eh?) Usmanov has
also been tossing his bulk around Britain's ludicrously skewed libel
courts, which are designed to protect the high and mighty (and down and
dirty) from the prospect of having their soiled rainment exposed to the
generality.
In brief, Usmanov made with the legal hit-men, and strong-armed
Murray's website host into pulling the plug. But Murray found a new
home for his website, when our main man Rich stepped into the breach,
offering to host the site on his server, in defiance of oligarchical
bluster. This new Murray site was due to launch on Monday, October 1;
but lo and behold, Rich's server was hit by the hacker firebomb on
Sunday, September 30 – just hours before the Murray site was to go
live. Certainly an interesting juxtaposition of events, to say the
least. (The
new Murray site is not quite ready to go, but you can see
a backup version here.)
Anyway, we're back, again, and loaded for bear, as usual. Thanks for
your patience. If in the future we should be temporarily muzzled for a
considerable time again, you might buzz over
to the old Empire Burlesque site here, where we will use for stop-gap blogging.
As all the world knows – oh, all right, as a handful of people in the
world knows – over the weekend we were savagely hacked, yet again, by
the enemies of truth and enlightenment. (That is the current term of
art for political hackers, isn't it?) This was in fact the worst hack
yet, a most expert and sophisticated operation that penetrated some
very heavy security and wreaked enormous damage, essentially wiping out
the entire server with a number of dissident websites. 
