Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 257

The 2016 Golden Globes: Messy, Drunken, Absurd

The Golden Globes are known for being one of the more raucous events of awards season, but even going by those standards, the 2016 ceremony stood out. From the British comedian Ricky Gervais’s tone-deaf presenting job to an oddball group of winners who shed little light on a confusing Oscar race, the overall impression was one of chaos. Frequently throughout the show, the crowd could be heard loudly chatting amongst themselves, perhaps because they were as confused as viewers about what was going on. Even some of the winners seemed to have overindulged, stumbling over their speeches, forgetting to thank people, and defiantly refusing off-screen instructions from producers to “wrap it up.”

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Gervais opened and closed the show with some purportedly humorous observations about on-screen representation of transgender people in 2015, from Caitlyn Jenner to Transparent to The Danish Girl, but his outrageous shtick mostly failed to land as anything but an annoyance. Gervais, who’s now hosted the Globes four times, prides himself on lancing the egos of Hollywood’s rich and famous, but mostly tripped up on terrible topical references. A later encounter with Mel Gibson, who was introducing a clip from the Best Picture nominee Mad Max: Fury Road, was similarly awkward, although like much of the material from the live broadcast, half of their combative dialogue was edited out by censors.

The Globes, awarded by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, tend to pride themselves on pointing to Oscar favorites, but in a year with few clear frontrunners, they did little to help. Steve Jobs, Danny Boyle’s biopic of the Apple founder, had seemed to vanish from contention after faring poorly at the box office, but collected trophies for Best Screenplay (Aaron Sorkin) and Supporting Actress (Kate Winslet). The Revenant, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s grueling tale of survival on the American frontier, won for Best Drama Picture, Best Director, and Best Drama Actor (Leonardo DiCaprio), and while DiCaprio is an Oscar favorite, it’s hard to imagine Iñárritu winning the big awards just a year after sweeping them with his previous effort, Birdman. Meanwhile, critical favorites like Spotlight, Carol and Mad Max: Fury Road all failed to win anything.

Brie Larson was named Best Drama Actress for Room, anointing her the favorite for that Oscar trophy in February. The Comedy film awards largely went to films no one would label as comedy. The Martian, an action thriller set in space, won Best Picture and Best Actor (Matt Damon), while David O. Russell’s biopic Joy won for Best Actress (Jennifer Lawrence). Sylvester Stallone’s Best Supporting Actor win for Creed drew a sentimental standing ovation from the crowd, but he forgot to mention his director and co-stars in his speech (a fact he quickly realized and rectified at the show, but after the broadcast had cut to commercial).

Gervais prides himself on lancing the egos of Hollywood’s rich and famous, but mostly tripped up on terrible topical references.

While the film awards usually go to Oscar favorites, the Globes’ TV awards are more eclectic. Most of 2016’s winners were from shows few are watching: Amazon’s streaming series Mozart in the Jungle, set in New York’s classical music scene, won for Best Comedy Series and Best Actor (Gael Garcia Bernal); USA’s acclaimed hacker drama Mr. Robot won for Best Drama Series and Best Supporting Actor (Christian Slater); and Rachel Bloom, of The CW’s Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, won for Best Comedy Actress and excitedly praised her network for supporting a show that had been rejected everywhere else she pitched it. Then Lady Gaga collected a trophy for Lead Actress in the poorly-reviewed American Horror Story: Hotel, which seemed to validate the common complaint that the Globes voters prefer star power to quality.

There were some bright moments—like Jamie Foxx rolling his eyes at Quentin Tarantino’s rambling speech for The Hateful Eight’s original score, or Eva Longoria and America Ferrera acidly referring to each other as “Salma” and “Charo” as they introduced an award. Denzel Washington accepted an honorary award with his family on stage, but cut his speech short because he’d left his glasses at his table, a blunder that was one of the more charming moments of the night. Taraji P. Henson, who won Best TV Drama Actress for Empire, took to the stage distributing cookies amongst the crowd, in honor of her character Cookie Lyon. But these highlights were few and far between in a three-hour ceremony that was as forgettable as Gervais’s punchlines.

The full list of winners:

Best Film (drama): The Revenant
Best Film (comedy): The Martian
Best Director: Alejandro Iñárritu, The Revenant
Best Lead Actor (Drama): Leonardo DiCaprio, The Revenant
Best Lead Actress (Drama): Brie Larson, Room
Best Lead Actor (Comedy): Matt Damon, The Martian
Best Lead Actress (Comedy): Jennifer Lawrence, Joy
Best Supporting Actor: Sylvester Stallone, Creed
Best Supporting Actress: Kate Winslet, Steve Jobs
Best Screenplay: Aaron Sorkin, Steve Jobs
Best Original Score: Ennio Morricone, Hateful 8
Best Original Song: “Writing’s on the Wall,” Sam Smith and Jimmy Napes, Spectre
Best Animated Film: Inside Out
Best Foreign-Language Film: Son of Saul, Hungary

Best TV Drama: Mr. Robot
Best Lead Actor, TV Drama: Jon Hamm, Mad Men
Best Lead Actress, TV Drama: Taraji P. Henson, Empire
Best TV Comedy: Mozart in the Jungle
Best Lead Actor, TV Comedy: Gael García Bernal, Mozart in the Jungle
Best Lead Actress, TV Comedy Rachel Bloom, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
Best Supporting Actress, TV: Maura Tierney, The Affair
Best Supporting Actor, TV: Christian Slater, Mr. Robot
Best Limited Series or TV Movie: Wolf Hall
Best Lead Actor, Limited Series: Oscar Isaac, Show Me a Hero
Best Lead Actress, Limited Series: Lady Gaga, American Horror Story: Hotel

A Hospital Bombed in Yemen

At least four people have been killed and 10 others injured after a strike on a Médecins Sans Frontières-supported hospital in Yemen, the medical aid group said Sunday.

At around 9:20 a.m. local time, a “projectile” struck the Shiara Hospital in the Razeh district of northern Yemen, said the group, which is also known as Doctors Without Borders, in a statement on its website. At least one more projectile fell near the hospital.

The strike led several buildings inside the medical facility to collapse. Three of the injured are staff of MSF, which has been working at the hospital since last November. Two are in critical condition, the group said.

MSF could not confirm the origin of the attack, but said planes were seen flying over the hospital at the time. All staff and patients have been evacuated, some to Al Goumoury hospital, which is also supported by MSF, in Saada.

Northern Yemen has seen months of heavy bombardment by airstrikes. A coalition of nine Arab states, led by Saudi Arabia, has been bombing Iranian-allied Houthi rebels in the country on behalf of the Yemeni government since last spring. The strikes have killed hundreds of people and destroyed buildings and homes, leading to food and medicine shortages.

Raquel Ayora, MSF’s director of operations, said that “all warring parties, including the Saudi-led coalition, are regularly informed of the GPS coordinates of the medical sites where MSF works.”

“There is no way that anyone with the capacity to carry out an airstrike or launch a rocket would not have known that the Shiara Hospital was a functioning health facility providing critical services and supported by MSF,” she said.

The hospital in Razeh is the third hospital supported or run by MSF to be struck in the last three months. Last October, the United States bombed a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, killing 30 people. MSF officials said the U.S. and allied forces were given the GPS coordinates of the medical facility; the U.S. said the hospital was “mistakenly hit.” Days later, Saudi-coalition airstrikes destroyed a small hospital in the Haydan district in Saada in Yemen.

Another Appalachia

When President Lyndon Johnson designated Appalachia as the battleground for the War on Poverty, black and white images of destitute families and broken-down barns came to define the region. Some 50 years later, those stereotypes remain—and Roger May is working to change that. His project, Looking at Appalachia, crowdsources images from photographers (professional or amateur) inspired by the mountainous stretch of land between New York and Mississippi. Eventually, they hope to start incorporating writing, audio and video to the project. "We’re hoping to offer a more balanced and nuanced look at an incredibly complex and diverse region," May said.

What's Next for El Chapo?

The Mexican government is reportedly willing to extradite Joaquín Guzmán, the powerful Sinaloa drug cartel boss known as ‘El Chapo,’ to the United States for trial, Mexican officials told news outlets on Saturday.

Mexican officials previously captured Guzmán in February 2014 in a major victory against the cartels for recently elected President Enrique Peña Nieto. That victory turned into humiliation in July when Guzmán escaped from Mexico’s highest-security prison via a sophisticated mile-long tunnel built by his associates. Mexican marines re-captured him on Friday in Los Mochis after one of the largest manhunts in the country’s history.

U.S. officials had filed a formal extradition request for Guzmán only three weeks before his escape, but the Mexican government previously resisted U.S. pressure to send him north, according to The New York Times.

When Enrique Peña Nieto became the president in 2012, his government initially adopted more of an arms-length approach to the United States on security cooperation than his predecessor had. That often meant taking a more assertive stance in matters of sovereignty, including a reluctance to turn over prisoners to the United States.

[...]

Almost exactly one year ago, Jesús Murillo Karam, the Mexican attorney general at the time, said: “I can accept extradition, but when I say so. El Chapo has to stay here and do his time, then I’ll extradite him. Some 300, 400 years later. That’s a lot of time.”

This time, however, officials seem to fear that Guzmán could use his considerable resources to free himself again. In 2001, Guzmán escaped from custody by bribing officials and hiding in a laundry basket as it was wheeled out of the prison.

If turned over to U.S. authorities, Guzmán would face indictments in seven different U.S. federal courts for drug trafficking and murder. The maximum sentence he would likely face if convicted is life imprisonment without parole. Mexico formally abolished capital punishment in 2005 and is one of many countries that refuses to extradite defendants to the United States unless prosecutors promise not to seek the death penalty.

Guzmán’s lawyers are expected to strongly contest any extradition attempt, and the full legal process could take months in the courts. In the meantime, Guzmán is being held at the prison from which he broke out last year—albeit in a different cell.

Tyler Perry and the Internet's Boyfriend: The Week in Pop-Culture Writing

The Brand Keeping Oprah in Business
Rembert Browne | Vulture
“It comes down to the question of who gets to decide what’s good for black people. Should all kinds of blackness be shown, or should its representation be curated? To Perry, no one should have the authority to make that call. To others, however, there is a clear line between what’s good for ‘us’ and what isn’t.”

How the Internet Picks Its Boyfriends
Sulagna Misra | The Cut
“These men might be famous, but the way we share images of them on social media, the way we message our friends GIFs and images and quotes, makes them feel close to us, Hollywood publicity machine be damned. Consuming their work and the media around it doesn’t feel so different from Internet-stalking a crush.”

So, Like, Why Are We So Obsessed With Podcasts Right Now?
James Wolcott | Vanity Fair
“Podcasts are essentially radio on the installment plan, a return to the intimacy, wombed shadows, and pregnant implications of words, sounds, and silences in the theater of the mind … Instead of peddling itself to demographic markets, it appealed to interests, enthusiasms, and the oral tradition of storytelling, and for every interest there’s a flock of podcasts vying for attention.”

Jaden Smith for Louis Vuitton: The New Man in a Skirt
Vanessa Friedman | The New York Times
“The fear of semiological chaos (and the force of historical convention) explains in part why clothing norms have held on so long. We want to understand what we are seeing, and we want those seeing it to understand what we are saying. But here’s the thing: As much as understanding, we also want admiration; to think we look good in what we are wearing.”

Outsourcing
Sadie Stein | The Paris Review
“I consider the Great British Baking Show (née Bake Off) the most important breakthrough in formulaic comfort viewing since the first witness was surly to the first dedicated detective of the Special Victims Unit. Shamelessly cozy, aggressively anodyne, equal parts comforting and engaging, GBBO is an Anglophile’s shameful dream come true.”

Playing for Time: A Father, a Dying Son, and the Quest to Make the Most Profound Video Game Ever
Jason Tanz | Wired
“Green, though, is doing the opposite. He’s trying to create a game in which meaning is ambiguous and accomplishments are fleeting. He is making a game that is as broken—as confounding, unresolved, and tragically beautiful—as the world itself.”

Sports Illustrated Wants to Redeem Adrian Peterson, Even If Adrian Peterson Doesn’t
Diana Moskovitz | Deadspin
“Despite explicitly disavowing the usual jock-redemption narrative, this story manages to hit all the marks in the standard player forgiveness profile, even as its subject insists he did nothing wrong. One of the greatest running backs in recent history doesn’t want your forgiveness, but SI, perhaps out of habit, tradition, or pure muscle memory, can’t help but make the case for it anyway.”

How the Weird, Unfiltered Internet Became a Media Goldmine
Joe Veix | Fusion
“This is the Lonely Web. It lives in the murky space between the mainstream and the deep webs. The content is public and indexed by search engines, but broadcast to a tiny audience, algorithmically filtered out, and/or difficult to find using traditional search techniques.”

Kobe Bryant’s ‘Light-Skinned’ Remark Hints at NBA’s Peculiar Racial Politics
Dave Schilling | The Guardian
“What does it really mean to go to the hole like a light-skinned dude? The NBA is a league dominated by black men. It’s a league that has benefitted greatly from the influence of hip-hop and black culture. Basketball is a black sport and is better off for it. And yet, the divide between the light and the dark persists in the league and in the wider culture.”

My Accidental Career as a Russian Screenwriter
Michael Idov | The New York Times Magazine
“Whatever censorship exists is mostly self-administered. The timidity on display, though, is often hilarious: The Russian adaptation of Homeland moved the action back to 1999, because nothing bad could possibly happen to Russia under Putin (at least on TV) … In the absence of hard guidelines, people are left to explore the boundaries of their own bravery.”

The George Awakens
Bryan Curtis | The New Yorker
“It took a unique—well, derivative—sequel to create an atmosphere in which Lucas could be viewed in a new light. The biggest reason Lucas looks better is because The Force Awakens is an admission that, 38 years later, the original can’t be topped.”

What Did the Governor Know About Flint's Water, and When Did He Know It?

In Flint, Michigan, a scandal over lead-tainted water keeps getting darker.

On Tuesday, Governor Rick Snyder declared a state of emergency due to lead in the water supply. The same day, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it is investigating what went wrong in the city. Several top officials have resigned, and Snyder apologized. But that’s only so comforting for residents. They’re drinking donated water supplies—though those donations are reportedly running dry—or using filters. Public schools have been ordered to shut off taps. Residents, and particularly children, are being poisoned by lead, which can cause irreversible brain damage and affect physical health. It could cost $1.5 billion to fix the problem, a staggering sum for any city, much less one already struggling as badly as Flint is.

The story is horrifying, on a visceral, “this isn’t supposed to happen here” level. While attention has been slow to focus on Flint, the more that emerges, the worse the story seems. The latest question is when Snyder knew about the problem. This week, an email from Snyder’s then-chief of staff to a health-department official was turned over as part of a freedom-of-information request. In July 2015, Dennis Muchmore wrote:

I'm frustrated by the water issue in Flint I really don't think people are getting the benefit of the doubt. Now they are concerned and rightfully so about the lead level studies they are receiving. These folks are scared and worried about the health impacts and they are basically getting blown off by us (as a state we're just not sympathizing with their plight).

On Thursday, while declaring the state of emergency, Snyder wouldn’t say when he became aware of the lead problem in Flint. The governor—a trained engineer who likes to portray himself as a can-do manager—reportedly grew testy when asked repeatedly about his own awareness.

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The problem dates back to April 2014, when Flint was under the direction of an emergency manager appointed by the state to try to fix the broken city. (Michigan law provides for the governor to select managers, and the provision has been used in several places in recent years, most prominently Detroit.) To save money, the city began drawing its water from the Flint River, rather than from Detroit’s system, which was deemed too costly. But the river’s water was high in salt, which helped corrode Flint’s aging pipes, leaching lead into the water supply.

The move saved millions, but the problems started becoming apparent almost immediately. The water starting smelling like rotten eggs. Engineers responded to that problem by jacking up the chlorine level, leading to dangerous toxicity. GM discovered that city water was corroding engines at a Flint factory and switched sources. Then children and others started getting rashes and falling sick. Marc Edwards, a Virginia Tech environmental-engineering professor, found that the water had nearly 900 times the recommend EPA limit for lead particles. As my colleague Alana Semuels noted in a deeply reported feature in July 2015, residents believe the city knew about problems as soon as May 2014. Yet as late as February 2015, even after tests showed dangerous lead levels, officials were telling residents there was no threat.

The July 2015 date on Semuels’ story emphasizes the incredible slowness of authorities to respond. That was more than a year after the switch to water from the Flint River. This week’s state declaration of Emergency comes some 20 months after the switch. How did it take so long to get anything done?

Semuels described the deeply interlocked series of causes in her piece:

But it’s not one emergency manager, or one bad decision about pumping water from the Flint River that has led these problems—and that might be the scariest part of all. Neglected infrastructure is really to blame, but it’s not quite as satisfying to blame old pipes as it is to blame the people in charge. And the city’s financial woes have a lot to do with its shrinking population, but it’s hard to blame the people who left in hopes of finding employment or a better life elsewhere. Eroding infrastructure isn’t unique to Flint. Things just broke down there first.

Even if the causes of the crisis are elaborate and inevitable, the state’s slow response provides ways to think a little bit about how the response broke down.

First, there’s a question of democracy. As Chris Lewis wrote in The Atlantic in 2013, the emergency-manager law raises serious questions about representation. If the manager is appointed by the state, he or she is not answerable to the population at the ballot box, and that means he or she is far less accountable when things go wrong. (This is exacerbated by the fact that the cities with managers are mostly Democratic, largely by virtue of being cities, while Snyder is a Republican.) That’s not just a bug—it's also a feature, since the managers are thought to be able to make painful but necessary choices that an elected official just won’t have the stomach to make. Flint’s water shows what can happen when the link between residents and authorities is broken: months of poisoned water supply.

There is a second, and more fundamental, question to the whole debacle as well. In 2014, a UN Special Rapporteur delivered a scathing attack on the city of Detroit, which was shutting off water services to residents who’d fallen behind on the bill. The city was in a tough spot: It was cash-strapped and deeply in debt, and it couldn’t afford not to get the money. But of course that was the problem the residents were facing too; like the city, they didn’t have the money. “Without water, people cannot live a life with dignity,” the UN said. “Denial of access to sufficient quantity of water threatens the rights to adequate housing, life, health, adequate food, integrity of the family. It exacerbates inequalities, stigmatizes people and renders the most vulnerable even more helpless.”

There’s a tendency to think of access to clean water as a basic human right—and certainly one in a prosperous, developed nation like the United States. Given how slowly authorities came around to dealing with Flint’s lead poisoning, even after the evidence was clear, can anyone expect the government to guarantee their own clean water?

The Forest: The Problem With Trying to Make Suicide Spooky

Imagine a Japanese horror film called The Bridge, in which a man travels to San Francisco after hearing that his troubled twin brother was last seen on the Golden Gate Bridge—notoriously a spot where people go to kill themselves. He learns from a string of kooky, panic-mongering locals that people often hear voices or see bad things while on the bridge, and that demons can latch themselves on to your sadness and trick you into doing awful things. But he gets a native guide to take him there, and embarks on a journey where he has visions of giggling, demented American school girls, and is chased by angry spirits who were among the more than 1,600 people whose lives were unwittingly claimed by the bridge.

If this movie existed, and thank goodness it doesn’t, it would’ve been a disaster in all the ways The Forest is. The new horror film, directed by Jason Zada, stars Natalie Dormer as Sarah, a young American woman who travels to Japan because her psychic twin sense tells her that her sister, Jess, is in trouble. It turns out Jess, who has a history of mental illness, has gone into the Aokigahara Forest, known also as the Sea of Trees or, in catchier parlance, “The Suicide Forest.” With the help of a hot travel writer who materializes in a bar (Taylor Kinney) and a wise but timid Japanese guide, Sarah decides to search for Jess herself, despite all the warnings that spooky things happen to those who stray off the path. The Forest does a lot of things in its 95-minute run: It drags, it makes fun of weird Japanese food, it has Jess trip and fall precisely one million times, it piles on the jump scares. But crucially, it doesn’t make the slightest sincere effort to portray the Aokigahara forest with the respect or sensitivity that such a real-life place deserves.

This isn’t to police what should or shouldn’t be “off-limits” for horror. And not every horror film needs to make a grand point about society: The Forest ​likely had no ambitions of being more than some easy, low-budget, winter box-office fare. But if a film decides to tell a story about a real-life place—that still exists, that will likely be the site of future suicides, that is freighted with cultural complexity—then that film assumes a kind of moral burden, whether it wants to or not.

The Forest tosses this burden aside quite handily. It plays up how much of an outsider Sarah feels in a strange land, how disorienting it is to be the lone white face in a sea of (literally) cackling and ogling foreign ones. Her isolation becomes more complete once she enters the forest, though part of that is her fault—she does her best to lag behind the others, or run off into the trees by herself at night. Rather than playing on the atmospheric eeriness of the forest, the film resorts to having a rotating cast of suicide ghouls pop out from the brush. (Dormer, who shines as a fan-favorite character on Game of Thrones, doesn’t feel at home in her first horror-movie role, but the weak script doesn’t do her many favors.)

There’s a bit of sad backstory to Sarah and Jess that explains why the former feels so driven to rescue the latter, and that attempts to make the mythos of Aokigahara more immediately relevant. But whatever storytelling or visual points the film may have scored (the forest’s ethereal beauty translates well to the screen) vanish in the final act, which delivers a strange, cynical, and ultimately empty, conclusion.

R U ready 2 enter the #scariestplaceonearth w/ #NatalieDormer& @TaylorKinney111 2day?#BEWARE #firsthorrormovieof2016 https://t.co/ujnLckSk1t

— The Forest (@theforestisreal) January 8, 2016

The. Forest. Is. Real. So the ads for the film want potential viewers to believe. But The Forest’s embrace of the word “real” extends only so far as it lends the movie “based on a true story” cred. Meanwhile, the story itself inflates—and invents—mystical sources of death and despair while doing all it can to ignore the very ones rooted in actual human experience. Demon corpses that intone in English, “Turn around, Sarah,” and shapeshifting Japanese ghosts, and shrieking animals make for simpler cinema than the actual-real reasons that can lead people to commit suicide: mental illness, isolation, demographic risk factors, social and cultural pressures.

It’s one thing to exclude any acknowledgment that suicide is a major public-health issue in Japan (or to include a single line in the film aimed soberly at suicide prevention). It’s yet another for the film to shrug off empathy for the people who die in the forest. During a scene where the forest guide tries to talk a man out of killing himself, Sarah and Kinney’s character engage in some small talk about Jess, as if reminding the audience with whom their concern should really lie. The Verge’s Emily Yoshida, who did an excellent job of unpacking The Forest’s egregious whitewashing, deciphered one of the film’s disturbing messages: “Japanese people don’t feel death like we do.”

With no compelling characters, scares, or plot points to redeem The Forest, the best option for those ​curious about Aokigahara is probably to watch a 20-minute 2005 VICE documentary about it. In the painful but humane film, the geologist Azusa Hayano actually meets a man who has entered the forest to die and gently urges him to leave. At another point, Hayano finds a skeleton. (“You know, even if you stare at a suicide corpse, it can’t attack you,” he says. “So it’s not terrifying.”) Toward the end, Hayano discovers a collection of flowers and some chocolates, likely left by the family of a suicide victim. “You think you die alone, but that’s not true. Nobody is alone in this world,” Hayano says. It’s a sentiment with which The Forest, by its ending, couldn’t disagree more.

A New Threat to the Syrian Refugee Program

When congressional Republicans were trying to halt the Syrian refugee program last fall, a central pillar of the Obama administration’s defense was that there was no more arduous way to enter the United States and that few if any refugees had ever been arrested on terrorism charges.

That argument took a big hit on Thursday night, when federal prosecutors unsealed indictments against two refugees from Iraq on charges involving international terrorism. Aws Mohammed Younis Al-Jayab, a 23-year-old Iraqi-born Palestinian living in California, allegedly flew to Syria in 2013 and 2014 to join terrorist groups and then lied to immigration officials questioning him about his activities upon his return. Al-Jayab arrived in the U.S. from Iraq in 2012 and also lived in Arizona and Wisconsin. He was charged with making false statements.

In a separate case, Omar Faraj Saeed Al Hardan, another Palestinian born in Iraq, was indicted on charges alleging that he provided material support to the Islamic State and then lied about it. Al Hardan, 24, was living in Houston and came to the U.S. as a refugee in 2009 before gaining permanent legal status two years later.

The arrests could revive the push by Republicans in Congress to suspend the refugee program for Syria and Iraq, which stalled at the end of last year. Senior lawmakers and presidential candidates rushed to publicize the arrests to bolster their insistence that despite nearly two-year waits for most refugees, the program was not secure enough.

“If this is not enough evidence, I don’t know what is,” Representative Michael McCaul of Texas said at a Capitol press conference. As chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, McCaul authored legislation that the House passed in November with a veto-proof majority. McCaul and other House Republicans called on the Senate to take up the bill. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said it’ll be considered early in 2016.

“They’re ticking time bombs, and how many ticking time bombs are we going to bring in through these refugee programs before we have a proper vetting process in place?” McCaul said. “If these two guys got through the cracks, how many more are in there?” McCaul said he had been briefed on the FBI’s investigation and that while he couldn’t talk about it until Thursday’s charges were announced, it clearly fed into the urgency that Republicans felt when they pushed the refugee bill so quickly through the House, with barely any time for debate.

“If these two guys got through the cracks, how many more are in there?”

Obama administration officials have said refugees from Syria already go through the most intense scrutiny of any entrants into the U.S., and the White House has said suspending the program would send a terrible signal given the nation’s history as an asylum nation. The government plans to resettle 10,000 additional refugees this year, a much lower total than Canada or many European nations plan to accept. Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, wouldn’t comment on the arrests during his briefing on Friday but touted the strength of the screening process.

Citing testimony by FBI director James Comey, Republicans have said that because of the chaos caused by the civil war and ISIS’s foothold in Syria, there isn’t enough intelligence to determine whether potential refugees present a security risk. McCaul said that based on the briefings he’s received, he didn’t know if either of the two men arrested were radicalized before or after they arrived in the U.S.

Critics of the refugee program have accused the administration of overstating their success in keeping terrorists from infiltrating the U.S. They point to reporting from ABC News that a pair of Iraqi refugees who were resettled in Bowling Green, Kentucky, were later found to have links to al Qaeda.

On the presidential campaign trail, Ted Cruz pounced on the arrests within an hour or so of the announced indictment. He called a press conference in Iowa on Thursday evening to demand that U.S. officials retroactively evaluate refugees that have already been resettled from the Middle East in light of the indictment. "These arrests underscore the need... for President Obama to suspend this indefensible policy putting political correctness ahead of national security,” Cruz said, according to CNN.

The push to pause the refugee program faded in December as both parties turned their attention to tightening the visa-waiver-travel program, which the administration said was a bigger risk for exploitation. Changes to that policy were included in the year-end omnibus spending bill, while the House’s bill suspending the Syrian refugee program was not. With the Senate expected to take up that measure soon, the refugee arrests on Thursday may have given the issue new life.

Terror Arrests Pose New Threat to Syrian Refugee Program

When congressional Republicans were trying to halt the Syrian refugee program last fall, a central pillar of the Obama administration’s defense was that there was no more arduous way to enter the United States and that few if any refugees had ever been arrested on terrorism charges.

That argument took a big hit on Thursday night, when federal prosecutors unsealed indictments against two refugees from Iraq on charges involving international terrorism. Aws Mohammed Younis Al-Jayab, a 23-year-old Iraqi-born Palestinian living in California, allegedly flew to Syria in 2013 and 2014 to join terrorist groups and then lied to immigration officials questioning him about his activities upon his return. Al-Jayab arrived in the U.S. from Iraq in 2012 and also lived in Arizona and Wisconsin. He was charged with making false statements.

In a separate case, Omar Faraj Saeed Al Hardan, another Palestinian born in Iraq, was indicted on charges alleging that he provided material support to the Islamic State and then lied about it. Al Hardan, 24, was living in Houston and came to the U.S. as a refugee in 2009 before gaining permanent legal status two years later.

The arrests could revive the push by Republicans in Congress to suspend the refugee program for Syria and Iraq, which stalled at the end of last year. Senior lawmakers and presidential candidates rushed to publicize the arrests to bolster their insistence that despite nearly two-year waits for most refugees, the program was not secure enough.

“If this is not enough evidence, I don’t know what is,” Representative Michael McCaul of Texas said at a Capitol press conference. As chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, McCaul authored legislation that the House passed in November with a veto-proof majority. McCaul and other House Republicans called on the Senate to take up the bill. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said it’ll be considered early in 2016.

“They’re ticking time bombs, and how many ticking time bombs are we going to bring in through these refugee programs before we have a proper vetting process in place?” McCaul said. “If these two guys got through the cracks, how many more are in there?” McCaul said he had been briefed on the FBI’s investigation and that while he couldn’t talk about it until Thursday’s charges were announced, it clearly fed into the urgency that Republicans felt when they pushed the refugee bill so quickly through the House, with barely any time for debate.

“If these two guys got through the cracks, how many more are in there?”

Obama administration officials have said refugees from Syria already go through the most intense scrutiny of any entrants into the U.S., and the White House has said suspending the program would send a terrible signal given the nation’s history as an asylum nation. The government plans to resettle 10,000 additional refugees this year, a much lower total than Canada or many European nations plan to accept. Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, wouldn’t comment on the arrests during his briefing on Friday but touted the strength of the screening process.

Citing testimony by FBI director James Comey, Republicans have said that because of the chaos caused by the civil war and ISIS’s foothold in Syria, there isn’t enough intelligence to determine whether potential refugees present a security risk. McCaul said that based on the briefings he’s received, he didn’t know if either of the two men arrested were radicalized before or after they arrived in the U.S.

Critics of the refugee program have accused the administration of overstating their success in keeping terrorists from infiltrating the U.S. They point to reporting from ABC News that a pair of Iraqi refugees who were resettled in Bowling Green, Kentucky, were later found to have links to al Qaeda.

On the presidential campaign trail, Ted Cruz pounced on the arrests within an hour or so of the announced indictment. He called a press conference in Iowa on Thursday evening to demand that U.S. officials retroactively evaluate refugees that have already been resettled from the Middle East in light of the indictment. "These arrests underscore the need... for President Obama to suspend this indefensible policy putting political correctness ahead of national security,” Cruz said, according to CNN.

The push to pause the refugee program faded in December as both parties turned their attention to tightening the visa-waiver-travel program, which the administration said was a bigger risk for exploitation. Changes to that policy were included in the year-end omnibus spending bill, while the House’s bill suspending the Syrian refugee program was not. With the Senate expected to take up that measure soon, the refugee arrests on Thursday may have given the issue new life.

Details on the Ambush of an Officer in Philadelphia

A Philadelphia police officer who was shot and wounded late Thursday was targeted by his assailant in the name of Islam, police said Friday.

“He confessed to committing this act in the name of Islam,” Richard Ross, the city’s police commissioner, said at a news conference Friday.

The suspect, Edward Archer, 30, fired at Officer Jessie Hartnett, 33, and his car 13 times from a semiautomatic pistol, Ross said. Hartnett returned the fire, hitting Archer at least three times, Ross said. He added the gun was a stolen police weapon.

Harnett was hit three times in his left arm. He is in critical, but stable condition at Presbyterian Hospital. Ross called the officer’s injuries “very serious.”

Surveillance video of the incident shows the gunman, wearing a white robe over his clothing, running right up to the police car, putting his gun inside the driver-side window, and firing. He was arrested shortly afterward after running from the scene.

“This is absolutely one of the scariest things I’ve ever seen,” Ross said at the news conference. “This guy tried to execute the police officer. The police officer had no idea he was coming.”

Captain James Clark, the homicide unit commander, said Archer told detectives: “I follow Allah. I pledge my allegiance to the Islamic State. That is why I did what I did.”

But Jim Kenney, the Philadelphia mayor who also spoke at the news conference, downplayed the religious connection.

“This is a criminal with a stolen gun who tried to kill one of our officers,” he said. “It has nothing to do with being a Muslim or following the Islamic faith.” He then repeated those comments on Twitter.

Police did not classify Friday’s attack as a terrorist incident. Philly.com noted that Archer’s mother indicated he is mentally ill. Here’s more:

Reached at her home in Lansdowne, his mother, Valerie Holliday, said Archer was the eldest of seven children and suffered head injuries from playing football and a moped accident.

"He's been acting kind of strange lately. He's been talking to himself . . . laughing and mumbling," Holliday said. "He's been hearing voices in his head. We asked him to get medical help."

She said her son is devout Muslim who has practiced the faith "for a long time."

"He's going through a lot lately," Holliday said, adding Archer believed he was targeted by police.

"I don't know how he got the gun," she said. "I'm still hoping they have the wrong child."

Archer was previously found guilty of forging documents, and, in a separate case, of assault.