Vladimir Arutinian

Anybody ever heard of Vladimir Arutinian? Anybody? Evidently I thought you should 18 months ago. A quick visit to the link and, woopsy-daisy, look at that: "On 10 May 2005 he made an attempt to assassinate U.S. President George W. Bush during his visit to Georgia [FSU]." Yeah?

The wiki elaborates:

On 10 May 2005, Arutyunian threw a Soviet-made RGD-5 hand grenade, wrapped in a red tartan (plaid) handkerchief, toward the podium where President Bush stood as he addressed a crowd in Freedom Square in downtown Tbilisi. The grenade landed 18.6 metres (61 feet) from the podium, near which Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, his wife Sandra E. Roelofs, Laura Bush, and other officials were seated. The grenade, however, failed to detonate.

Georgian officials claimed that the grenade was a non-combative engineering type used in training, which either did not contain explosives or would have had to be very near the President to cause him any harm, and that it had been placed approximately 100 feet from the podium where Bush was speaking, in an attempt meant to scare the crowd and gain media attention.

However, after an investigation, Bryan Paarmann, head of the FBI office in Tbilisi, reported that it was a live grenade which had been thrown, hitting a girl in the crowd, which cushioned the impact and prevented the grenade from detonating. Officials initially said that President Bush had been in no danger, but Bryan Paarmann of the FBI later identified the attack as endangering the President's life...

So, basically, if I understand it, the security around W was so poor back in 2005 that some Russian whack-job was able to throw a grenade at him? And the only reason he wasn't hurt was because said whack-job was stupid?

OK, let's say Arutinian was just trying to 'cause a scene.' Fine. Is that why the security people allowed Arutinian to keep his grenade when they found it before he threw it? No... because if they found the grenade he would have been arrested and whisked off to some black site to be tickled by the CIA.

Basically, the complete irony of the security regime of W is that the president's life was saved because his potential assassin was the only living person who is more incompetent than W himself.

Pic from here. Backpost finished 4/8/08 3:03 AM, started 7/24/06, 10:03 PM. I had just the link.