The Associated Press is reporting that a U.S. Border Patrol agent shot and killed Sergio Adrián Hernández Huereca, a 14-year-old boy on the U.S. side of the Paso Del Norte bridge in El Paso, Texas. According to the FBI, border patrol agents were assaulted by rock throwers across the border in Mexico. T.J. Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council, believes the use of “deadly force” was a justified response. “It is a deadly force encounter,” Bonner told the Associated Press. “One that justifies the use of deadly force.”

Despite the border patrol agent’s undeniable “deadly use of force,” reports confirm that he was not injured and it still is not known whether Hernández Huereca was directly involved in the alleged rock throwing.

Rock-throwing assaults represent a diminishing, but persistent threat that border patrol agents have faced over the years. In 2007 the Associated Press reported that U.S. officials equipped Border Patrol SWAT teams with tear gas, “flash bombs” that emit blinding light and “sting ball” grenades that disperse hundreds of tiny rubber pellets to “spare lives” when responding to such assaults. However, the violent, and potentially deadly treatment of Mexican migrants has not been avoided entirely. In March 2007, an agent shot and killed a 20-year-old Mexican man whose arm was cocked back in a location where rock attacks frequently occurred. Two years before that, an agent fatally shot a rock thrower at the San Diego-Tijuana border. Just this past Saturday, U.S. Border Patrol agents shot and injured two individuals in San Miguel, Arizona following a rock-throwing assault. Last week, a different U.S. Border Patrol agent pleaded guilty to assaulting and violating a Mexican man’s civil rights by kicking the victim, striking him in the stomach with a baton, throwing him down to ground, and punching him. Innocent families caught in the middle of the crossfire have long been complaining about the indiscriminate use of tear gas and pepper spray.

The shooting of Hernández Huereca also comes just days after the death of Anastacio Hernández, a father of five U.S. born children who was shot with a stun gun by a Customs and Border Protection officer two weeks ago at the San Ysidro border crossing as he resisted being deported. While Customs and Border protection maintain their actions were necessary to “subdue the individual and maintain officer safety,” the victim’s family and immigrant advocates believe his death was a result of a failed immigration system. Last week, the San Diego County coroner ruled that his death was a homicide. Once again, reports suggest that the agent who fired the shot was virtually unharmed.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon has condemned what some officials like Bonner apparently view as a reasonable use of deadly force, expressing “energetic protest of the torture and death of Anastasio Hernandez, a Mexico who died at the hands of North American migration authorities.” “[A] death with that degree of violence is a truly unacceptable violation,” Calderon said. “We need to raise all our voices, not only for Mexico but for human rights, because the cause of migrants is a cause that affects us all.” While some have slammed Calderon’s criticisms, it’s hard to believe that the U.S. would not respond even more harshly if an American citizen had been treated similarly by Mexican agents.

Back in 1997, a completely innocent 18-year-old, Esequiel Hernández Jr., was accidentally shot by a U.S. Marine in Redford, Texas, one mile from the Mexican border. His death, which was widely considered a “casualty of the [militarized] drug war,” sparked outrage and led Defense Secretary William Cohen to temporarily suspend troop patrols near the U.S.–Mexico border. Despite the fact that the U.S. side of the border is presently “one of the safest parts of America,” Republicans today continue calling for more boots on the ground to combat dangerous drug cartels.

Yesterday, a Florida Muslim leader named Joshua Evans was at the center of an anthrax scare, when he received a “tissue stuffed inside with white powder” in the mail. Officials had him go to the hospital for testing, although it was eventually determined that the materials were not a “biological threat.” Still, Evans said that the intent was clearly malicious: “Someone does not wrap a tissue up with powder in it and stuff an envelope and send it to you with good intentions.” Evans used to be a Christian minister before converting to Islam, and he now often attracts controversy for criticizing his former religion. Watch a local news report on the incident:

What is disturbing about this incident is that it is the third high-profile anti-Islamic incident in the Jacksonville, FL area in recent months. As ThinkProgress reported in April, when University of North Florida professor and Fulbright scholar Parvez Ahmed went before the city council for confirmation to the Jacksonville Human Rights Commission, he had to answer irrelevant questions “about gay marriage, God, Islam and prayer in public places.” Another councilman mocked him for being Muslim and requested that he “say a prayer to your God” during a public hearing.

Last month, someone set off a pipe bomb at the Islamic Center of Northeast Florida. Although dozens of people were inside, no one was injured. The attack came just a few hours before Ahmed was to attend his first Human Rights Commission meeting. Both Ahmed and Evans worship at that mosque.

ThinkProgress spoke to Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) spokesman Ibrahim Hooper about any possible connection between the three incidents. “I think it’s related to the overall rise in anti-Muslim sentiment in our society, unfortunately,” said Hooper. “You get a tiny minority taking extremist rhetoric and turning it into violent actions.” CAIR is also calling for federal officials to “investigate the [Evans] incident as a possible hate crime.” On Friday, Attorney General Eric Holder said that the Jacksonville pipe bomb incident was a “top concern” for the Justice Department, which was treating it as a hate crime. (HT: Spencer Ackerman)

Responding to this post, Michael Rubin criticizes me for criticizing him “for omitting Bush in my criticism of Obama’s tendency to engage dictators.”

Matt may not be aware that I often criticized the Bush administration for the same (here, for example). It makes sense to criticize President Obama now because, frankly, Obama is commander-in-chief and calls the shots.

To be fair, my comment was directed at Rubin’s lament about Obama administration officials and U.S. congressmen having their photos taken with Kurdish president Masud Barzani, which I found funny because a quick search revealed numerous photos of Bush and Barzani. But I take Michael’s point: Bush did, in fact, engage with dictators, and Rubin did, on occasion, criticize him for it, and now it’s Obama’s turn.

Michael follows up with this zinger:

I realize that Center for American Progress is not allowed outside of its partisan straitjacket, but it does our broader national-security strategy harm when advocacy is based on politics rather than policy.

Ouch, good one! But wait, here’s what I wrote in my post:

I don’t disagree with Michael here on the Obama administration’s lack of follow-through on the promise of the Cairo speech, which I’ve found deeply disappointing, or with his [Michael's] concern about the increasing oppression in Iraqi Kurdistan. Nor do I disagree that cuddling up to dictators encourages cynicism and anti-Americanism (though isn’t it interesting how conservatives can make such claims without being accused of “blaming America”?)

Of course, later in the day Rahm Emanuel showed up and severely beat me for writing that. (Just as he beat my colleague Brian Katulis after Brian signed this bipartisan letter calling on the administration to pressure Egypt to clean up its act on human rights and democracy.)

As to the more substantive point of democracy “backsliding” in the Middle East, Michael takes issue with my citation of a recent RAND study of the negative consequences of the Iraq war, writing that “it should be remembered that RAND studies are the products of their authors rather than the end-all and be-all of debate”:

Indeed, many lead authors at RAND make the evidence fit their political conclusions rather than vice versa. (Anyone who has ever heard James Dobbins speaking loudly on his cell phone to journalists while in the Dulles Airport Red Carpet Club knows that.) During the Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Clinton administrations, there was very little progress, let alone effort, in the realm of Middle East democracy. It became a priority after 9/11 for reasons argued by Natan Sharansky. The backsliding during Bush’s second term, which has been embraced by Obama, had more to do with a decision in the White House to take the path of least resistance and let the State Department lead rather than follow policy.

True, no single study is is ever “the end-all and be-all of debate,” which is why I also cited a Freedom House report, released just as Bush was leaving office, that noted that global freedom was in decline. Michael can cast aspersions on RAND’s (highly respected) work all he wants — or, better yet, he could actually put up something he thinks they got wrong — but the fact is that numerous other studies have shown almost precisely the same thing: Rather than demonstrating the extent of American power and promoting freedom, the Bush administration’s aggressive Middle East policy succeeded mainly in demonstrating the limits of that power, diminishing American influence and harming the cause of political reform.

Now, one could look at this evidence and conclude, as I and many others have, that the various theories that animated the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq and its broader Middle East policy (Sharansky’s book of banal aphorisms about freedom, while perfectly pitched for a C-student like Bush, wasn’t published until 2004, by the way) were enormously stupid and counterproductive, and that Bush’s second-term second term shift, rather than being some sort of capitulation to that neocon bete noir, the State Department, was part of an unfortunately necessary effort to contain the fallout from the failure of those theories.

Or, you could do what I think Michael does, which is argue that Bush simply lost his nerve in the face of bureaucratic resistance, echoing the old Communist line that Communism hadn’t really failed, because true Communism had just never been tried.

Again, I agree with Michael that cutting deals with dictatorial regimes contributes to cynicism and anti-Americanism. I also recognize, as does President Obama, that such deals are sometimes necessary to serve to larger goal of American security. I would ask Michael, though, what he thinks makes people more cynical about America: Recognizing that we need to deal with unsavory regimes sometimes, and then trying to deal with those regimes, as Obama has done? Or doing what Bush did, deliver a lot of high-flying speeches against tyranny, while at the same time delivering people to those same tyrants to be interrogated and tortured?