The body of information used to make this intelligence assessment includes reporting regarding Syrian officials planning and executing regime chemical weapons attacks; reporting that includes descriptions of the time, location, and means of attack; and descriptions of physiological symptoms that are consistent with exposure to a chemical weapons agent.
Moscow sees the uprising against Syrian President Bashar Assad as a Western-backed attempt at executing regime change, while U.S. officials consider the 2-year-old civil war a justified rebellion against a corrupt and brutal autocrat.
"They were threatening to put him on trial and execute him as a regime spy," Wiley told me.
Before Fidel Castro took power in January 1959, the island was ruled by a close American ally, Fulgencio Batista, a military dictator whose regime executed many thousands and tortured countless more for their opposition to his government, which certainly controlled "all levers of power".
The regime executed people who tried to adapt by engaging in private business.
But it canceled the showing in April, after the Castro regime executed three hijackers and arrested scores of dissidents.
After collaborating with Hitler to conquer their country, the Soviet regime executed some 22,000 Polish officers and intelligentsia in 1940 in the so-called Katyn massacres, hoping to annihilate the country's leadership class and forestall resistance to communist rule.
However, after the revolution, the Islamic Republic's regime executed so many students and political oppositionists every day that no one could name a particular day for a particular occasion.
The Shia Muslim tradition believes the Mahdi, its messiah, will return, but its adherents had not previously considered putting themselves in power.Revolutionary jargon justified purges and trials (the regime executed 2,946 people in 1981 alone, according to Amnesty International).
