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MASS GENERAL BRIGHAM AND LOCKHEED MARTIN: THE TALE OF AN ODD COUPLE
 
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Jennifer Scarlott
January 28, 2025
Common Dreams
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_ 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. _

Gaza in ruins. This aerial view shows displaced Palestinians
returning to the war-devastated Jabalia refugee camp in the northern
Gaza Strip on January 19, 2025, shortly before the ceasefire. , Omar
Al-Qattaa/AFP via Getty Images

 

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
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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
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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:

* 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.
* C-130 Hercules transport planes, which supported the ground
invasion of Gaza.
* M270 Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (MLRS) used to bomb Gaza.
* AGM-114 Hellfire missiles for Israel’s U.S.-supplied Apache
helicopters, a primary weapon used in aerial attacks on Gaza.
* 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 [[link removed]] 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
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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
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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 [[link removed]]. For
Palestine’s sake. And because freeing Palestine will free us all.

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Jennifer Scarlott is a Northampton, MA-based organizer working with
River Valley for Gaza Healthcare and Demilitarize Western
Massachusetts. She is dedicated to the movement for a free Palestine,
from the river to the sea

* Lockheed Martin; Mass General Brigham Health Care System; Gaza;
Palestine;
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