One story that has been largely gone unnoticed in recent days is the death of Ramses Barron Torres — a 17-year-old Mexican national who was shot by a U.S. border patrol agent. At first, there were conflicting reports regarding the curious circumstances surrounding his death. Originally, a Mexican official reportedly said the teen died Wednesday after he fell from a border fence and hit his head on a rock. However, witnesses to the event claimed that Torres was shot by a U.S. Border Patrol agent. Ambassador to the U.S., Arturo Sarukhan, said on Thursday that it now appears “to be clear that the death was the result of a gunshot wound.”

KGUN has shared the testimony of a friend and witness to Torres’ death:

“The moment I came from running from up here (USA) to down there (Mexico), that’s when you can hear the gunshot. I thought that they were shooting at me, but they weren’t. This is when Ramses yelled, ‘They hit me! They hit me! Help me!” explained Torres’s friend, Sergio, who did not want his full name revealed.

Sergio added that aside from climbing the fence to visit Ramses’s American girlfriend, the two did nothing else to provoke Border Patrol. His statements conflict with reports saying the boys threw rocks at the federal agents.

“We didn’t do any harm to them. We didn’t have any guns or nothing. We just had ourselves. I think they were just mad because they (Border Patrol) couldn’t catch us,” said Sergio.

Watch the report:

The FBI, which is leading the investigation, has maintained that Border Patrol agents were attempting to arrest suspected drug smugglers near the fence when bystanders began throwing rocks at them, prompting an agent to fire at them. Nonetheless, the agent who fired the shot was placed on administrative leave.

Regardless of which side is right, the incident presents yet another disturbing case of what appears to be excessive force. This past summer, Anastacio Hernández, a father of five U.S. born children, was shot with a stun gun by a Customs and Border Protection Officer at the San Ysidro border crossing as he resisted being deported. While Customs and Border protection maintained their actions were necessary to “subdue the individual and maintain officer safety,” the San Diego County coroner ruled that his death was a homicide.

A few days later, 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 who allegedly threw rocks at him. At the time, T.J. Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council, claimed “deadly force” was a justified response. However, I still have a hard time understanding how young, unarmed kids throwing rocks merits a deadly firing of bullets in response.

Either way, it’s still unclear whether rock-throwing was even involved in last week’s incident. According to the Arizona Republic, newspapers on both sides of the border reported that the incident occurred in an area that is under video surveillance, which will hopefully clear up what is about to come yet another international controversy.

(H/T Colorlines)

Discussing Iran’s nuclear program in an interview with Germany’s Der Spiegel, International Atomic Agency (IAEA) chief Yukiya Amano is careful not to suggest that the IAEA knows more than it actually knows:

SPIEGEL: According to the most recent estimates, Iran is only a year away from building a bomb.

Amano: I’m not so sure about that. Despite all unanswered questions, we cannot say that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program.

SPIEGEL: Because you lack the conclusive evidence, the “smoking gun?”

Amano: That’s not my choice of words. I’m talking about unanswered questions. What purpose do components for a highly explosive ignition system serve? What are neutron triggers needed for? Are there nuclear developments that suggest a military background? Iran must provide clarity on these issues. That’s the point.

Amano’s careful language is very much in keeping with U.S. intelligence community’s own public assessments. The CIA’s most recently released report, from March 2010, (pdf) stated:

We continue to assess Iran is keeping open the option to produce nuclear weapons, though we do not know whether Tehran will eventually decide to produce nuclear weapons. Iran continues to develop a range of capabilities that could be applied to producing nuclear weapons, if a decision is made to do so.

Now compare to this Washington Times’ lede yesterday on Israeli spy chief Meir Dagan’s statement that Iran will not be able to produce a nuclear bomb before 2015:

Israel and the United States recently revised their estimates of when Iran will field a nuclear weapon, reflecting difficulties inside Tehran’s program of building large numbers of centrifuges to enrich uranium.

I don’t mean to treat the Washington Times as representative here — irresponsibly hyping threats is, of course, central to that paper’s mission — only to point out that, given the stakes involved, and especially in light of very recent history, it’s important to speak carefully and accurately about what evidence we actually have in regard to Iran’s nuclear intentions.

“No one, absolutely nobody, perhaps not even Khamenei knows whether they will field a weapon, yet. Its all assumptions,” said Israeli analyst Meir Javedanfar, via email. “It will be a wait and see policy by the Supreme Leader. If by the time all is ready, his regime is weak both at home and abroad, he may test it, as a show of strength, especially at home.”

Iran may well eventually go for a nuclear weapon, at the very least it’s clear that they’re keeping that option open. As Secretary of State Clinton said in Abu Dhabi, the consequences of that could be grim, and, as Amano noted, the onus is on Iran to allay international concerns by cooperating more fully with the IAEA. But it’s also clearly irresponsible to assert more than we actually know.