by Bruce Falconer
Mother Jones Online

Meet Doug Brooks, whose trade group represents the private military industry’s biggest players. He makes hired guns sound like U.N. peacekeepers.

Last Wednesday afternoon, amid news that Blackwater USA security contractors had killed 11 Iraqi civilians and wounded 12 others in a Baghdad firefight, members of the antiwar group Code Pink gathered outside the Washington office of the International Peace Operations Association, a trade group that represents a who’s who of the private military industry. There to greet them when they arrived was Doug Brooks, the IPOA’s founder and president, who’d been tipped off to the protest earlier that day by an anonymous caller. “He was on the street with an assistant with an armful of IPOA magazines,” said Code Pink’s Gael Murphy, who heads the group’s Washington office. “He had a smile on his face the entire time as though it were some kind of industry expo day, and he kept [smiling], even as we were asking him about some pretty dreadful matters.” Brooks spent about an hour fielding questions and even escorted some of the protesters upstairs to see his office. I asked Murphy if Brooks had managed to change any minds. “No,” she said. “We were not fooled just because [Blackwater] has a network to cover them-that they’re somehow more legitimate than they were the day of the killings.”

Doug Brooks tells a different story. The day after the protest I met him at a bar near his office. He wore a dark suit and wire-frame glasses. “I think we developed some fans,” he said, still smiling. “One guy, for example, said, ‘I don’t like the concept, but I guess if we’re going to have companies doing this stuff, we need this kind of organization doing the oversight.’” Brooks seemed energized by the experience, which, despite its being a protest, he treated as an opportunity to convert the opposition. “Their questions were really good,” he continued. “We gave them paperwork. We gave them journals. A couple of them even took away IPOA pins.” He pulled one from his bag and placed it in my hand. It bore the image of a sleeping lion, the IPOA’s logo. “Just got a new batch in,” he said.

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