Protecting Our Critical Infrastructure from Attacks

On Secure Freedom Radio, Frank Gaffney has recently been raising the issue of the vulnerability of America’s infrastructure and sounding the alarm about the possibility of an attack on our power grid.

This week, one of his guests was Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma who serves on the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

Gaffney asked Lankford to comment on a related hearing on the resiliency of our critical infrastructure.

Lankford responded:

“It’s essential that we deal with critical infrastructure, obviously all of us depend whether it’s turning your phone on in the morning or whether it’s flipping on the lights in your home or water coming to your home or whatever it may be. We realize how incredibly vulnerable we are based on infrastructure, so what Chairman Ron Johnson is leading today is a hearing on homeland security, governmental affairs, that particular focus is going to be on defensive, what needs to be done, what is still missing and how can we pay attention to some of the obvious threats that are out there both militarily and asymmetric. Quite frankly, most of the countries around the world realize fully and they’re fully aware they cannot keep up with us militarily and so they look for ways asymmetrically to be able to compete against us whether that be cyber attacks or finding ways to do an inexpensive terror attack that would take down a large chunk of our infrastructure.”

Gaffney then turned to another subject he’s been following closely, the fact that Obama adviser Ben Rhodes lied to the congress in an effort to help pass the Iran Deal. Lankford offered his thoughts:

“The admission of it was what was stunning and I agree with that, there was no great surprise, there were many of us who were absolutely beating our head against a wall during that time period, competing with a White House that continued to say Iran is a new actor, we made this deal because they’re a new moderate force, we’ve gotta reinforce that, you’re working out of an old paradigm in Iran and look at these new moderate leaders. And what we find out now is that Ben Rhodes was creating what he called the echo chamber and he had a whole group of people in the media world that he basically tweeted out or he would send it to them directly, they would repeat it and just constantly be able to create this narrative that was false.”

Gaffney also asked Lankford to comment on the new bill which recently passed that allows families of 9/11 victims to sue Saudi Arabia:

“It’s actually not targeted directly at the Saudis , it’s targeted at any nation, whether it be the Saudis or whoever it may be that actually engages in promoting terrorism, equipping terrorism, training towards terrorism out of their official setting.”

Finally, Gaffney asked Lankford about Obama’s proposal for funding measures to research the Zika virus and the adequacy of the funding:

“It’s interesting to me, the president’s focus on we need more Zika funding, which we do need to deal with two specific areas on Zika, I guess three specific areas. One is the warning systems the CDC can do, the other one is dealing with mosquito populations, that is one of the best things we can do right now is knock down that population and within about a year and a half we should have a vaccine for Zika so that’s the actual preparation.“

Lankford then goes on to point out that the Obama administration claims they need two billion dollars to do that but has already raided the Ebola fund and the Infectious Diseases account for climate change research.

Obama’s urgency now seems a bit hypocritical.