Mass General Brigham and Lockheed Martin: the tale of an odd couple

By Jennifer Scarlott

When I think of hospitals, what immediately comes to mind is clean, brightly lit, quiet, and orderly spaces. I think of human healing and of caring, skill, and dedication. I think of technology applied to the noblest purposes. I think of people—people of all ages and colors—healing and being healed, people sharing the same hope that their loved ones will leave the hospital and thrive because of the treatment they received there.

When I think of weapons manufacturers, different images crowd my mind. I think of war, chaos, and destruction. I see maimed and dying people and animals. I see destroyed landscapes. I hear explosions and screaming. I smell smoke, blood, and death.

These thoughts seem to be in profound opposition. So you can imagine my shock when I learned that a member of the Board of Directors of Mass General Brigham (MGB), the giant medical system in Massachusetts with a national and global reach and reputation, is James D. Taiclet, the president, CEO, and chairman of the board of Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest weapons manufacturer.

MGB apparently has no trouble managing the contradiction of its mission and its friendship with one of the world’s top purveyors of death. How much, one wonders, does MGB accept in charitable donations from Lockheed Martin?

Did your mind recoil? Mine too, so I’ll repeat it: The CEO of Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest weapons manufacturer, serves on the Board of Directors of Mass General Brigham, one of the world’s largest and most prestigious healthcare systems.

Leaving, for a moment, the no doubt highly polished board room of MGB, with all of its luxurious appointments, let’s travel 8,000 miles away to the occupied Palestinian territory of Gaza. Though it is highly unlikely that James Taiclet has or ever will set foot here, there is evidence everywhere of his labors. This is because the company whose pinnacle he has reached is one of the largest weapons suppliers to Israel, both in the past, and during the current genocide in Gaza. Its technologies are integrated into Israel’s main weapons systems. Its weapons are frequently gifted to Israel through the U.S. government’s Foreign Military Financing program.

Despite the current, tenuous cease-fire, the Israeli-U.S. genocide in Gaza continues. Some of the weapons and weapons systems supplied by Lockheed Martin to Israel throughout the genocide include:

1. F-16 and F-35 fighter jets used to bomb Gaza. These two types of Lockheed Martin aircraft comprise nearly 80% of Israel’s fighter-bomber force and are largely responsible for turning nearly 70% of Gaza into rubble, by United Nations estimates.
2. C-130 Hercules transport planes, which supported the ground invasion of Gaza.
3. M270 Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (MLRS) used to bomb Gaza.
4. AGM-114 Hellfire missiles for Israel’s U.S.-supplied Apache helicopters, a primary weapon used in aerial attacks on Gaza.
5. CH-53K King Stallion heavy lift helicopters (manufactured by Sikorsky, a Lockheed Martin subsidiary), used to transport Israeli troops into and out of Gaza.

For 15 months, we witnessed, and those of us with a conscience were sickened by, the genocide in Gaza. We witnessed Israel’s final solution to the Palestinian “problem,” aided, abetted, and in partnership with the U.S. and other Western governments, and paid for by our taxes. Palestinian-British surgeon Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah estimates that 300,000 Palestinians have been murdered in Gaza, up to 12% of the population. The daily toll on children, who account for half of the population, has been historic and horrific, with more child amputees in Gaza than any other place on Earth. It has been accurately pointed out that the greatest threat on Earth to children is Israel. Civilian suffering and death in Gaza have not been “collateral damage,” they have been driven by the deliberate, racist dehumanization of the Palestinian people undertaken by Israel and the West since the horrendous Nakba of 1948 and before.

Let’s pause for a moment to recall that much of this death and destruction has been made possible through the ingenuity of the people of Lockheed Martin, whose leader sits on the board of a massive HEALTHCARE system. Though the cognitive disconnect is severe, please stay with it, because this is the reality of the country and the world that we live in.

Stay with your cognitive discomfort, because the contradiction is even more profound. Not only is MGB’s board member directly responsible for enormous carnage throughout Gaza, his Israeli and U.S. clients have deliberately and systematically targeted the healthcare system of Gaza. Hospitals have been bombed at other times in history, but the extent of the military targeting and destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system is unprecedented, breaking all humanitarian laws and norms including the famed Geneva Conventions. There are no fully functioning hospitals in Gaza. Over 1,000 healthcare providers have been targeted and murdered. Over 400 have been kidnapped and detained in torture camps. Hospitals, vaccination clinics, ambulances, and civil defense rescue squads have been bombed, sniped, and set on fire. Patients have been burned alive in their beds. Starving dogs and cats roam the hallways of tattered hospitals, feeding on the flesh of martyrs. Blockade and starvation have been used as deliberate weapons of annihilation. The four-month Israeli attack on the people and infrastructure of north Gaza was an extermination campaign the likes of which are unprecedented in living memory.

A little over one week into the cease-fire, the people of Gaza have been left to struggle for survival in a hellscape of inconceivable proportions. Israel’s systematic decimation of Gaza’s healthcare system, including its kidnapping and torture of renowned pediatrician Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, who refused to abandon his patients during the Israeli siege of Kamal Adwan Hospital, has been undertaken to destroy the will and spirit of the people, deepen their suffering, and fuel their desire to leave their homeland.

Let’s repeat—James D. Taiclet, the CEO of a company that has made possible these unspeakable horrors, who was found guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide by the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal this month, sits on the Board of Directors of Mass General Brigham healthcare system.

MGB, with its annual funding of more than $2 billion, is the largest, hospital-based research enterprise in the United States. It employs 82,000 people and treats 1.5 million patients annually. Its 2022 revenue exceeded $18 billion. It prides itself not just on the services it provides across Massachusetts, but on its national and global reputation. Its website touts the fact that MGB is the top system for National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding in the world. It boasts of 22 Nobel Laureates and 3,700 ongoing clinical trials designed to “accelerate bringing new treatments and therapies to our patients and the world.”

How does one square this shining vision of striving for optimal human health and performance with the depraved annihilation of the people of Gaza? MGB apparently has no trouble managing the contradiction of its mission and its friendship with one of the world’s top purveyors of death. How much, one wonders, does MGB accept in charitable donations from Lockheed Martin?

While it is crucial that we not lose our capacity for amazement at such a conjoining, let’s not be naïve. The bed-sharing of Lockheed Martin and Mass General Brigham is typical of the corrupt, profit-driven, military-worshipping system we inhabit. Look into who sits on the boards of your local hospitals, colleges, universities, and more. You will find the story repeated ad nauseam.

This story, this old, sickening, tired reality of our politics, our economy, our society, is overdue for radical overhaul. Doctors Against Genocide, a global coalition of healthcare providers and allies who vow to stop global genocides that governments fail or refuse to, has teamed up with River Valley for Gaza Healthcare in western Massachusetts in launching a petition demanding that MGB immediately remove James Taiclet from its board and renounce any association with Lockheed Martin.

C’mon, Mass General Brigham CEO Anne Klibanksi: Lockheed Martin is a criminal enterprise profiting from the wreaking of unimaginable havoc and suffering on humanity and the planet. It should be a global pariah, not have its boss man sitting on your board. Why has MGB failed to speak out publicly about the genocide in Gaza? Why has MGB failed to stand publicly with its healthcare colleagues in Gaza as they courageously struggle against tremendous odds? Your cozy relationship with Lockheed Martin’s CEO combined with your silence on Gaza make you a partner in its genocide and complicit in creating a world in which healthcare facilities and providers are fair game to warlords.

The sickness of U.S. society has deepened sharply with its partnership in the genocide of the Palestinian people. Let’s say no more to necropolitics. As Doctors Against Genocide member Rupa Marya wrote, it is long past time to move from colonial to liberation medicine. From racist colonialism to liberation in all aspects of our lives.

Free, free Palestine. For Palestine’s sake. And because freeing Palestine will free us all.

First published at Commondreams.org.