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The Current Transcript for April 20, 2016

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

Friends, fellow New Democrats, Manitobans. Democracy has worked tonight. The people are always right.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: If there ever was a pre-ordained outcome, it was this one. Manitobans were showing their displeasure for Greg Selinger long before they voted yesterday. Polls showed a steady shunning of the NDP leader well over a year ago, and even showed the party would do better with any other leader. And so as the Progressive Conservative's Brian Pallister celebrates a win and Greg Selinger carries the blame, we're seeing a bit of a pattern in how the personality of a party leader becomes the dominant factor in political outcomes. We're on that in a moment. Also today, Eric Fair never intended to torture for the U.S. government, but there he was, in Iraq.

SOUNDCLIP

His hands are tied to his ankles, he wheezes and gasps for air, too tired to cry, but in too much pain to remain silent. This is a sin; I know it as soon as I see it.

AMT: An interrogator at Abu Ghraib and then Fallujah, Eric Fair returned to the U.S. laden with guilt at what he'd done and what he'd seen. In half an hour, one man confronts the consequences. And after that, we're on the topic of mice and men-- and drugs.

SOUNDCLIP

If the clinical population in question is overwhelmingly women, it seems to me we have an ethical duty to study female biology, and of course we're just shirking that duty entirely.

AMT: As many as 80 per cent of the mice used in biomedical research are male, but of the 10 major drugs pulled from the shelves over the last 20 years, eight have posed greater health risks for women. The push for more balanced research, in an hour. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, this is The Current.

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Greg Selinger's Manitoba defeat reveals importance of leadership

Guests: Quito Maggi, Susan Delacourt, Daniel Veniez

SOUNDCLIP

BRIAN PALLISTER: Tomorrow as we walk out into that new spring day and the sun begins to rise in a blue sky rich with hope, rich with optimism, every Manitoban, north, south, east, west, across the city in every neighborhood, across the country in every town needs to know the only thing better than today in Manitoba is going to be…

CROWD: Tomorrow!

[applause]

AMT: Well, this is the tomorrow he promised them yesterday. A jubilant PC leader, Brian Pallister, now becomes the premier of Manitoba. 16 years of NDP rule in the province is over, despite a campaign where leader Greg Selinger even resorted to mea culpas to try to keep power.

SOUNDCLIP

Hi. It's been a tough year, and we haven't always gotten it right, but I always make decisions with your best interests in mind.

AMT: That's from a campaign ad. The result may not have been a big surprise; dissatisfaction with Mr. Selinger’s leadership had been growing since an ill received sales tax hike and a party revolt that took place on his watch. And what stands out to some about yesterday's vote in line with other elections in this country, is just how important the party leader’s personal brand has become in our politics, for good or ill. Quito Maggi is the president and CEO of Mainstreet Research. He's in our Ottawa studio. Hello!

QUITO MAGGI: Hello, good morning, Anna Maria.

AMT: Why do you think Greg Selinger and the NDP lost that election yesterday?

QUITO MAGGI: This goes back to that PST hike that you mentioned back in 2013. And then there was internal strife in the cabinet going back to last November, when we first started polling this the day after five cabinet ministers resigned. We found that a large majority of Manitobans wanted Selinger to resign at the time. Obviously, the cabinet didn't make that decision overnight. There must have been many, many discussions at the cabinet table for many months about this decision, and obviously, that shows that Mr. Salinger was quite stubborn. These five cabinet ministers made it pretty clear, made some very damning statements against their premier at that time. He decided to stay on, call the leadership, and won that leadership, but only very, very narrowly. and. And his fate was sealed at that time, I believe.

AMT: So there was internal anger at him because of the PST, and then also he had promised it was going to go to flood relief, did he not?

QUITO MAGGI: Yeah, that was the other, sort of the follow up to the broken campaign promise, was that he said it was going to flood relief. And then it was later revealed that a large percentage of that money wasn't, in fact, going to flood relief, but to general revenues.

AMT: So Quito Maggi, from your polling, what did you learn? How would the outcome of this election have changed if Mr. Selinger had resigned after that revolt, and not been leader going into this election?

QUITO MAGGI: Well, the only time we actually asked that specific question about, with a different leader in the scenario, was at that time in November of 2014. And Manitobans would have voted for an unnamed NDP leader five per cent more than for Greg Selinger at the time. And if we look at the results from last night, I mean, five per cent difference would have been substantial in terms of seat count. So I think it would have been a big difference.

AMT: So you've seen kind of like a slow march to this point?

QUITO MAGGI: I called it a train wreck that was 17 months in the making in my final commentary, and there would have been time. 17 months, a new leader, they could have righted the ship a bit and made this election more competitive. And certainly, Greg Selinger has that authenticity that we often hear about, but what he didn't have was integrity. So without integrity, the authenticity is meaningless.

AMT: I want to bring two more perspectives into this conversation. Susan Delacourt is a long-time Parliament Hill observer who writes for the Toronto Star and I-Politics, she is the author of Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them. Susan Delacourt is in Ottawa. And Daniel Veniez is a former federal Liberal candidate. He is also the corporate director of Veniez and Company, a financial advisory firm. He joins us from Vancouver. Hello.

SUSAN DELACOURT: Good morning.

DANIEL VENIEZ: Good morning.

AMT: Susan, was the NDP’s loss in Manitoba all Mr. Selinger's fault?

SUSAN DELACOURT: Well, I can't say that I’m a huge or close follower of exactly what went wrong there. It sounds like what Quito is describing, the train wreck, was sort of obvious from the outside. What it put me in mind of, because I’m here in Ottawa, is how the Liberals went on a bit of a train wreck a little more than a decade ago. And I think this happens when, you remember, there was a lot of dissatisfaction within the Liberal Party about Jean Chrétien’s leadership, and the hope that Paul Martin would, you know, take them into another decade. And I think sometimes, when the public sees a party imploding like that, as they watched in Manitoba, if the party itself doesn't seem like it has its act together, sooner or later there's going to be a reckoning at the ballot box.

AMT: And I was also wondering, Susan, if you listen to that Greg Selinger clip we played where he was doing a bit of a mea culpa, “I know we did things wrong but…” Was there a little bit of, like, the Stephen Harper campaign in there, where we actually saw people floating the idea, “Well if you just vote for us, we'll get a new leader.”

SUSAN DELACOURT: Yeah. Again, he'd had his chance to do those mea culpas almost two years ago. It seemed a little late, a little too little too late. The same way as Harper. Once the public gets seized with the idea that the government needs to change, as the more seasoned political experts on this panel will know, it's very hard to turn that kind of thing around.

AMT: Daniel Veniez, what do you think? Was the party equally responsible for the loss for the NDP?

DANIEL VENIEZ: When any government spends more time than its past due date in power, I think change is always in the air. So you can't discount the factor, obviously, that this is a government that, like others in Canada, that ran its course. And people were ready for something different. And obviously, the popularity of a leader is important, the personal brand of a leader is important, the policies of a government and the ongoing support that people have for them is important. You come to a point, as was the case with the Chrétien Martin government, as was the case with the Harper government, that notwithstanding the personal brands or popularity of leaders, people want a change. There are some anomalies, of course, which is why broader factors are always at play here. In British Columbia a few years ago, you had an incredibly unpopular government. The Gordon Campbell government, that Christy Clark then took over after a leadership win. And then as premier, she did distinguish herself for two years. Hit a campaign, and she became an extremely effective, very articulate, very hopeful and optimistic spear carrier for the message and a renewed mandate for that government. You contrasted that at the time with a very weak message and a very somber NDP and NDP leader, and what you got was a massive majority that no one expected would happen. All the polls were telling us at the time that the Liberals were headed for impending doom.

QUITO MAGGI: Well, not all the polls.

DANIEL VENIEZ: [laughs]

AMT: Oh Quito, let me get you to jump in here, then. You’ve made the point that personal deeds or misdeeds have a lot to do with how voters make their choices. During the Manitoba election, we learned that Progressive Conservative leader Brian Pallister, who just won last night, spends almost a fifth of his time in Costa Rica. He owns two companies there. Why didn't that have more of an effect?

QUITO MAGGI: I think it was the timing of when that was revealed, I guess. This all started with about a week to go in the election campaign. Greg Selinger invited media to his house to reveal his financials, one year's tax return. I didn't really particularly think it was effective. He called on the other leaders to do so. Rana Bokhari, the Liberal leader, released that afternoon on the Sunday. And, you know, Premier Pallister didn't refuse to reveal anything, except in that press conference that he gave, he did say that he even declared the value of his of his holdings in Costa Rica, and I guess that's what started people sort of digging into that file. And it was just too little too late. Everything that was done in that last week did absolutely nothing to pull votes to the NDP, it just kind of shuffled them around. We saw some very strange things happening with undecided vote going up in the closing weekend. That's highly unusual. We did see a late Liberal surge as well. We had them last Thursday, in our final poll, down to 11 per cent, and they did substantially better. As I told your producer yesterday, we did expect them to outperform those numbers.

AMT: And so Susan, you were talking about the federal parallel to Chrétien and Paul Martin. Do you see any other federal parallels?

SUSAN DELACOURT: Yeah, actually, it may be that why the Costa Rica holdings, or time away, didn't catch on because that wasn't an issue in the campaign. The idea of loyalty or fidelity or attachment to Manitoba, I think these kind of things only catch on if the public is sort of seized with that. The parallel would be Ignatieff. The idea in the 2011 that Michael Ignatieff didn't come back for you became an issue in the election campaign, about whether he was really Canadian or not. And I think pollsters like Quito would know that even after the campaign, there were a significant amount of Canadians convinced that that Michael Ignatieff was American.

AMT: Well--

SUSAN DELACOURT: The same issue couldn't be said of Pallister. He's been around a long time, he represented provincially and federally. So I think that's-- the Costa Rica thing may become an issue when he's premier a bit, but I don't think it played into what strategists like to call a narrative.

AMT: Daniel, what do you think? You ran as a Liberal in the 2011 federal election. You did not win, your leader at the time was Michael Ignatieff. He was criticized for lacking charisma, and he was also criticized by the Conservatives for wanting to come back and suddenly run the country after being out of the country for 30 years. How did that perception affect your own candidacy?

DANIEL VENIEZ: It was it was huge. When you're a candidate and you're knocking on doors, or doing with a candidate does, you're focused, obviously, on conveying a message, and on trying to win. And your focus, attention, your mindset is around the idea that you are the best candidate and you're representing the best party. It was clear and it became more clear as the dust settled after the fact, as we were doing and I was doing my own portion, what I could have done better, that the leader and the perception of the leader had a huge, huge impact on how people voted. A lot of Liberals then stayed home, for example. We thought that there would be a coalescing around the Liberal Party in British Columbia, certainly in my constituency at the time, in order to defeat the Conservative candidate. That didn't happen. After the debate at that time, there was a massive shift in momentum towards the NDP, and that famous wave, of course, caught. But the perception of the leader as a strong leader, articulate, authentic, all of those things, is incredibly important. Both at the national level, of course, and how it translates to votes at the door.

SUSAN DELACOURT: Anna Maria, you notice how much we're using words like advertising and brand, because I think we are now in an era where a lot of the public is getting their information about politics from the advertising of the parties. And you don't see parties putting out ads about their complicated platforms, they attach-- because party loyalty is basically nonexistent anymore, you see people floating from left to right and back and forth again, as we saw in the last campaign-- that we've given up the idea of party ideology and loyalty to parties for brands. And brands need emotion, as the ad experts will tell you, and the person to convey that emotion and brand is usually the leader. So advertising was hugely important in the 2015 fall campaign, too.

AMT: Well, let me ask you about. So Justin Trudeau emerges as one of the biggest political brands, both nationally, internationally, how does that kind of media clout and brand attribute affect the way he governs?

SUSAN DELACOURT: It's going to be very-- notice the attention he has paid to his brand, and making it an international one within the first four or five months of office. That's not an accident. I think that the leader will attach his name to the things there that the party wants to do. It's interesting that he didn't campaign in Manitoba; he did campaign in the Ontario, in an Ontario by-election. But as far as I know, I was trying to check this yesterday and correct me if I’m wrong, I don't believe he did any campaigning. So it's not, there wasn't an aversion to, he just didn't lend his brand to that campaign.

QUITO MAGGI: No, he didn’t go to Manitoba.

AMT: And so Quito, what did we learn about the role of leader from Tom Mulcair’s run with the federal NDP?

QUITO MAGGI: I think that goes back to, you know, what's often been brought up, that factor of authenticity. And I think Thomas Mulcair, people didn't believe that, it was almost like he was playing a part during the campaign. People knew him from Question Period, he was a strong performer. And then he was a totally different person during the campaign, during those key debates. You know, I really pointed at August 6th, I believe it was, that debate, the very first debate. A couple of days before the writ was called. That was a real turning point. Trudeau became a new person. More himself, more stronger, more confident, more articulate self; and Thomas Mulcair played it safe and had this kind of silly grin on his face the whole time, that I'm sure his advisors told him to do. But it didn't end up playing well, it didn't have that authenticity.

AMT: Daniel, I’m wondering what you think of, if we are in a point where the leaders and the brand, and that really makes the difference, how does that affect the individual candidates, in the runs for the individual constituencies? Do you have concerns about that?

DANIEL VENIEZ: Yes and no. It's a reality. First of all, I think leaders have always been central to how national campaigns develop in our run, and the popularity of parties. They are the standard bearer for their parties, and we as candidates, in large part, go along for the ride. I should say in passing, Mr. Trudeau, now the prime minister, came to my constituency at the time, many times to lend a hand, and he was really quite incredible in doing it. And every time he stepped in the constituency, which is where his parents were married, and it's the constituency of his grandfather, or that his grandfather held, he would be-- and it wasn't celebrity. It was his ability to connect with people on an individual basis, eyeball to eyeball. And he did that consistently every time he came, and I saw him in action. And at the time, he had no desire, or no apparent desire, to run for higher office. He was happy being a Member of Parliament helping the party. No one thought that he would be leader. But people flocked to him, and that is a rare and very, very special gift. And so the challenge, or the opportunity in this case, because I do think it is a huge one, will be how to translate that trust and connection that he's built with Canadians into governance. Into executing on policy. And so far, so good. And I think that he and his government are using that strength, the foundational strength of the leader, in order to carry some policy that may not be popular. And it's early days, but they're leveraging that, I think, very smartly, in terms of the political capital that the leader himself has built.

AMT: Okay, well, and the so let me just keep it, back to Manitoba for a minute, though. Quito Maggi, given this, again, dominance of the leader, what's the message for Mr. Pallister as he gets ready to take over the premiership in Manitoba post Greg Selinger, who as you said, was part of that 17-month long train wreck?

QUITO MAGGI: Yeah, he's going to have some challenges. I mean, he has that supermajority, more than two-thirds of the seats. So he's going to have a bit of a honeymoon period, but then I think some of the issues that were brought up late in the campaign are going to keep coming back up. He has some tough choices to make, in terms of what he does with his Costa Rica holdings. Otherwise, that could be a real challenge for his brand going forward, and might be damaging if he wants to serve more than one mandate. You know, maybe that's a decision he has to make some sooner rather than later.

AMT: Okay, we have to leave it there. Thank you, all of you.

ALL: Thank you.

AMT: I’ve been speaking with Quito Maggi, he’s the president and CEO of Mainstreet Research. Susan Delacourt is a long-time Parliament Hill observer and the author of Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them. They’re both in Ottawa. Daniel Veniez is a former federal Liberal candidate and corporate director of Veniez and Company, a financial advisory firm. He’s in Vancouver. So do you vote for the party or the leader? Your local candidate? Are big leader brands bad for democracy? Good for democracy? Let us know what you think, we’re at cbc.ca/thecurrent. Click on the contact link or tweet us on Twitter, we are @thecurrentcbc.

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Tortured conscience haunts former Abu Ghraib interrogator

Guest: Eric Fair

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: theme]

AMT: Still to come, of mice and women – it's a tale of too few female mice being used in biomedical experiments potentially skewing results and doing female patients no favours. We'll hear about efforts for gender equity among research animals and why it is no small matter. That story in half an hour, but first an interrogator probes his own conscience.

SOUNDCLIP

The things that happen in this prison under Saddam Hussein were horrific. Thousands and thousands and thousands of human being mistreated, tortured, and killed. In recent months we’ve seen abuses here under our responsibility. And it's been a body blow for all of us, but it doesn't represent America. It doesn't represent Americans values. It doesn’t represent the values of you, each of you here in this room. I know that. You know that. Your families know that.

AMT: Well, the voice of then US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. In 2004 he made a surprise visit, addressing soldiers at the most notorious prison site of the Iraq war. Graphic pictures had been surfacing in the media, glimpses of depravity, of the physical, sexual, psychological torture that was happening inside the walls of the Abu Ghraib prison. Just to see those images was to be haunted by them - photographs of US military personnel grinning for the camera while they abused Iraqi prisoners of war. And the abuse at Abu Ghraib and other US detention facilities in Iraq haunts my next guest to this day. Eric Fair worked at Abu Ghraib as an interrogator. He was not one of those military police officers ultimately charged for those crimes. But he admits that he did abuse and torture prisoners. He's written about his experiences and coming to grips with his own culpability in a new book called Consequence: A Memoir. Eric fair is in Washington, DC. Hello.

ERIC FAIR: Hello. Thanks for having me.

AMT: As you listened to Rumsfeld, what are you thinking?

ERIC FAIR: Rumsfeld knew as did many others that we were waterboarding. And that we were using a number of other techniques - at the time being called ‘enhanced interrogation’ - but which were clearly torture, so had a voice like Rumsfeld—Well, so his voice came out, but had he then actually implemented-- You know, he's talking about American values and the things that shocked our conscience-- Had he moved forward and helped implement policy I think we certainly could have avoided some of the consequences that we're now facing for our actions.

AMT: Tell me a bit about your background. What did you do before you became an interrogator at Abu Ghraib?

ERIC FAIR: Well, I enlisted into the army in 1995. I had gotten out of college and I wanted to be a police officer. And in the United States, one of the best ways to do that is to get military preference points on the civil service exam. So I enlisted into the army and the army trained me as an Arabic linguist and I spent five years, essentially, doing training exercises. And got out 2000 because there didn't seem to be much need for Arabic linguists in the army at the time and I returned home to Pennsylvania and became a police officer. Now, I lost that job as a police officer due to a heart condition and it was right up during the run up to the Iraq war and the invasion. And I was upset about, sort of, being removed from that community, from the law enforcement in the military community and I could not re-enlist and I couldn't work for a number of agencies. But contractors were just coming in to being, or at least large scale contracting was coming into being, and so I found a way to get to Iraq and get back into that military community with contracting, which did not require a health examination. And that's how I ended up as an interrogator.

AMT: You worked for a company called CACI. What did you call it?

ERIC FAIR: Well, we called it [khaki]. It's an acronym. And, which quite frankly, I've long forgotten what it stands for. You can certainly go on their website. CACI is a large defence contractor that's involved mainly in electronics with the government and has done it, apparently, very well for a number of years. But many of these contracting companies were tasked with providing interrogators and intelligence analysts and other jobs that they had not provided large scale before and so there was a rush to find people and get them overseas to begin to, sort of, work on a mission that was very quickly getting out of control. We clearly were not prepared for the insurgency that followed the invasion. We were clearly were not prepared for the number of prisoners of war that we had in our prison camps. And so the need for people like interrogators and screeners was immense.

AMT: And so you wind up at Abu Ghraib.

ERIC FAIR: I did. My original job assignment was actually in Baghdad but some of my fellow - I was going to form a specific kind of team called a human support team, but the gentlemen that were supposed to work with me had not arrived and so there was a convoy going out to Abu Ghraib, I think, the second day I was there. And they suggested that I go out for a few days and see some of the interrogations. And then I ended up spending over a month there, and then on to Fallujah.

AMT: Okay. Tell me about the hard side at Abu Ghraib. How was it different from the rest of the prison?

ERIC FAIR: Well, Abu Ghraib is an immense prison complex and the vast majority of prisoners were held in outdoor camps, something in a neighborhood of 5,000 prisoners. The hard site was one of the prison facilities that like any prison was full of cells and open bays and we used it as a place for what we were calling high value targets, so prisoners that had either been high ranking members in Saddam's Ba’ath Party or that were believed to have some kind of link to international terrorism. Most prisoners that we were talking to the outdoor camps would be interrogated once maybe twice over an hour or two and then we'd move on to the next one. The prisoners in the hard site were, well, were interrogated for days or weeks or months however long their stay was.

AMT: What did you see in that hard site?

ERIC FAIR: Well, I was only in there one day. It was December. And so Iraq is cold in December. And most of or a significant number of the prisoners in the hard site were naked. A good number were chained to their-- Many were in individual cells and they were chained to their cells. They had handcuffs in between their legs and then chained back behind them. And this was one of the stress positions, which was forced standing and then also combined with sleep deprivation, so it simply prevented them from sitting down.

AMT: When you look at some of the pictures that were taken at Abu Ghraib by the interrogators, you see people who appear to be enjoying humiliating and torturing prisoners. Were those men and women sadists?

ERIC FAIR: No. And I think that's become an easy excuse for most Americans and most people in general is to simply look at those photos and see the smiling faces of those military policemen and simply identify them as sadists or cruel or evil. That does not in any way suggest that-- And I think I've made very clear in my book, that people like me made it immense mistakes and things that we deeply regret, but to simply label them as sadists I think is to abandon them, the way that people like Donald Rumsfeld abandoned them. This was policy and policy was implemented and we, as a nation, decided that we were going to use enhanced interrogation, which is simply another word for torture. So I don't for a second exonerate any of those people but if it's-- To suggest that they were sadists is, I think, kind of intellectually lazy. And I think we need to take a closer look at the exactly what happened and why they were willing to do those things. You know, another thing you that you should take a close look at in those photos is that those pictures are not taken in the back corner of a dark cell or in some sort of isolated part of the prison. They’re in wide open bays with all of the lights on and there are lots of people walking around. Enlisted soldiers know how to keep things hidden from officers. They know how to do things and not get caught. There is clearly no fear or no concern in any of the soldiers that they are going to be seen doing what they're doing and, again, it was because everyone at the prison was on some level aware that this was the behaviour. Now, even I see some of those photos and there are certain practices that I was not aware of, things like mock executions and the use of dogs or things that I didn't see, but that's not to suggest for a second that had I been exposed to those things that I would have done anything about it.

AMT: You were not part of the hard site crew. Tell me about some of the interrogation techniques you would use to try to break prisoners.

ERIC FAIR: Well, the vast majority of my interrogations were direct. As an Arabic linguist I had a huge advantage in being able to simply have a conversation with an Iraqi. I often used a translator because certain dialects and certain parts of the language were difficult for me, but once a prisoner recognized that I spoke Arabic I immediately had sort of an instant connection. But at times when prisoners didn't cooperate or it was clear that they were being deceptive there were techniques that you could use to physically exhaust them. And most of them were things like push up positions or slamming something down on the ground at a specific moment in a conversation. And then other stress positions, like holding books in their arms at length. And then eventually, once I moved out to Fallujah, I participated in a sleep deprivation.

AMT: Let's stick with Abu Ghraib for a minute. You write that you physically abused a boy who told you he had gone fishing with car batteries.

ERIC FAIR: That’s right.

AMT: Why didn't you believe him?

ERIC FAIR: Well, I was not familiar with the technique of fishing with car batteries—

AMT: Neither was I. How do they use them?

ERIC FAIR: So you put yourself in a boat, a non-metal boat, and you load it with a couple of car batteries and then have lead wires into the water and then float the boat around and the electricity from the car batteries will stun the fish, they rise to the top and scoop them up. Now, the way I discovered this was an intelligence analyst I had told this story to and told him how ridiculous it was. And he said, you know, it's not ridiculous. We do that in Georgia. You know, it's absolutely the way that the people fish.

AMT: But you didn't know that. What did you do to try to break that boy?

ERIC FAIR: Well, I'd talk about some of the techniques I used before. He was young and he was scared, as almost all prisoners of war are and so there's a deep, I think—Again, because I spoke Arabic I think he had a sense that this was a connection that he could make and that he was safe with me. And so once you get someone into that position, if you use these enhanced techniques – which, again, are torture - and I exhausted him with books in his arms. He immediately - and it didn't take long - he immediately confessed that, in fact, the car batteries were-- He part of a vehicle borne improvised explosive device cell and that he was transporting them between car garages. And so we did get information on the location of these things and there was a raid. The vehicle borne factory, IED factories were discovered. Now, I encountered other people who gave the same story and I used some of those same techniques and it turned out, it wasn't until later that I found out, that actually that most of these people actually were using the car batteries for fishing.

AMT: But in light of the fact the coalition forces were able to break up a bomb-making factory after your interrogation of that particular boy, was torture justified?

ERIC FAIR: No. No, no. You know, the Secretary of Defense just visited Iraq yesterday or the day before and, again, secretly. That stuff has been going on now for 12 years. Any suggestion that any of these techniques that may have provided some information were in any way successful is to have an incredibly narrow view of the meaning of success. And I think it's worth-- I think, you know, many have pointed out to me and I think it's entirely true that if I'd gone further with that boy and continued to talk to him and been more patient, how much more information might he have given me and how much more information might I have gleaned from the kids that I ended up using those techniques on that did not know about these. And it's a discussion that in many ways I’ve left behind. If that's who we've become as a people, that the effectiveness of something speaks towards the efficacy of it, I think we're in a sad state.

AMT: When you say young boys, how young?

ERIC FAIR: Well, it was difficult to determine exact ages, but 16 to 18 years old. There were certainly boys that were younger. You know, they were listed as young men, but, yeah, they were often picked up in large groups and, you know, fathers would have their sons with them or uncles who’d have their nephews, so certainly, yeah, there were young kids at Abu Ghraib.

AMT: Religion plays a big role in your life.

ERIC FAIR: It does, yeah.

AMT: You’re Presbyterian?

ERIC FAIR: I am.

AMT: How much did you think about god when you were an interrogator?

ERIC FAIR: Not much. My first day or right before my first interrogation at Abu Ghraib I remember walking out of the chow hall and I sat down on a Hesco barrier and attempted to do my morning quiet time, which is pretty important for a Presbyterian. And I got to the section where you ask, essentially, for requests and the idea that you would ask god to be with you during the day and I was thinking about how I ask god to aid me in this interrogation. You know, I was nervous, I was scared as anyone would be and, certainly, during and interrogation or the first day of work. But I recognize that I couldn't do that. It wasn't as if I was asking god to follow me out on my first day as a police officer or even my first day as a soldier. The idea that god would be with me in a prison was laughable. I mean, I was very familiar with scripture and scripture is clear that god is always, always on the side of the prisoner. There are myriad examples. I think, quite frankly, the most obvious would be Jesus himself was a prisoner, so it was a. It was a shock to the system and made it impossible to pray while I was in Iraq.

AMT: You write, in fact, that as you thought about that god is always on the side of the prisoner that your hands shook, your face-- You write, “My hand shake, my face warms, I feel nauseated. The sensation is terrifying. “

ERIC FAIR: Yeah. There was a definite physical reaction. I'm having it right now, as a matter of fact. It's a recognition that you're taking a turn that you that you shouldn't be taking. Now, the commitment to the army was so strong and the commitment to things like mission and duty were so strong and I accepted what was going on at Abu Ghraib because it was not being done behind closed doors, that I had an obligation to do it. And I simply convinced myself that, well, I tried to convince myself that these are the things that I should do. But there was no doubt that from the beginning I was having a difficult time justifying any of it.

AMT: And I want to pick up on that in a minute and let our listeners learn a little bit more of where you were working and I'll come back to that. You also worked as an interrogator in Fallujah.

ERIC FAIR: I did. So the numbers at Abu Ghraib were getting too large. They decided to send smaller teams out to the cities.

AMT: And interrogators were using something called the ‘Palestinian chair.

ERIC FAIR: That’s right.

AMT: What is that?

ERIC FAIR: So, I arrived in Fallujah and we saw it inside office. And it was a small, maybe two feet tall chair made of plywood and two by fours. And it was narrow. And it had plastic zip ties down at the bottom. It was designed—There was an enhanced technique called confined spaces and it was designed to force a prisoner down into a crouched position from which you couldn't recover and, essentially, cause muscle failure in the legs. And it was rather than - in terms of a confined space - rather than putting them in a box or a closet, which was being done to other prisoners in other places, it would simply force them to be in a position of a confined space.

AMT: You saw the mayor of Fallujah in the Palestinian chair. What did you think?

ERIC FAIR: Well, you know, as I wrote in the book, another intelligence analyst, who was not involved interrogations, was walking by the room when he was in the in the Palestinian chair. And I specifically, I remember him covering his face and sort of jokingly saying, you know, I don't even want to know. And that stuck with me, even then and certainly now in the future that, you know, there's a part of me that didn't want to know either. But I saw it and it was real. And we all sort of knew it was going on and as tempting it was and still is to kind of cover my face and pretend it didn't happen, there's no denying that it did. I and another interrogator put ourselves in the chair. You know, Fallujah was an incredibly violent place and we faced some incredibly violent individuals and so there are certainly-- I did not use the chair but I have to confess that I was tempted to. And I think before I wanted to use it I wanted to be sure that I knew what it felt like. And so we did lock ourselves into it and it was excruciating. And we didn't last long, but as painful as it was I think what was worse was sort of that fear that if someone didn't get us out and if someone didn't release us, there was a deep sort of unknown fear about just how painful it was going to be.

AMT: This is where my disconnect is as I read your account in this book, I was fascinated, but I had so many questions, because you’re a very religious man and, again, you know, like, the very first interrogation, as we just said, you're really uncomfortable with it and yet you keep going.

ERIC FAIR: Yeah. Well, it speaks-- and it's something I continue to process, but I think as I have thought about both my involvement in the church and my involvement in the army, they are two very similar organizations. There is a great deal of camaraderie. It's a place that you feel protected. And they also share some of the same values - the idea that you're far more concerned about the people around you than you are about yourself. That's very true, certainly, of the church. But it's also true of the army. I remain to this day very committed to-- Or the army remains a very honorable institution. There are incredible men and women who serve in it. And so that connection was so strong and my desire to be part of the war effort was so strong that it was very difficult or nearly impossible to break from that. And to see what my colleagues were doing and to know that leadership was aware and to sense that these were things that had to be done. But it certainly ran counter to the values that I had grown up with as a boy in the church and so the two just sort of fought against each other. Now, on some level I would say that eventually that the church won out but not before I, essentially, and others, did some terrible things.

AMT: You were not charged with anything that happened at Abu Ghraib. But what has it been like for you to live with what you did and what you have seen, there and in Fallujah?

ERIC FAIR: Well, it's had an incredibly corrosive effect on things like my marriage and my relationship with family and friends. It was a great deal of guilt and shame much of which was justified. I absolutely should have felt that way. Again, the people who were certainly on the other side of the table in those interrogations have suffered much worse. And I hope that it should be obvious reading the book that that's the case. I think many veterans struggle. There's the gratitude for service, thank you for your service, which all veterans appreciate and I'm not suggesting it should not be said, but it also masks, sort of, the truth of our experience, that for many veterans, you know, if you really knew what we did, you wouldn't be thanking us. You know, you would say - you'd be apologizing, as an American saying, I'm sorry that you had to do that and how do we how do we get you back? So, yeah, it's been an incredible struggle and justifiably so.

AMT: Torture is in the news with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. It came up during a New Hampshire candidates’ debate. Listen to his comment.

SOUNDCLIP

In the Middle East we have people chopping the heads off Christians. We have people chopping the heads off many of the people. We have things that we have never seen before, as a group, we have never seen before what's happening right now. The medieval times-- I mean, we studied medieval times. Not since medieval times have people seen what's going on. I want to bring back waterboarding. And I’d bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.

[crowd applause]

AMT: Eric Fair, when you heard Donald Trump say that, what do you think? How do you react?

ERIC FAIR: I remember I watched that with my wife. We hadn't watched many of the debates and just for whatever reason happened to sit down to be watching that and so I remember specifically hearing it. And it makes me sad. And I'm embarrassed. And I'm embarrassed because I remember thinking the exact same way in the wake of 9/11, that things had to change. And we had leaders saying that we were going to move to the dark side and work in the shadows and that we weren't going to have our hands tied behind our backs. And I thought, yeah, that's absolutely right. So, as I think as frustrated as I am to still be hearing that kind of rhetoric this many years on, I'm still, not sympathetic, but I certainly can empathize with the kind of anger and, quite frankly, the fear that is associated with those kind of remark. And it's not just Donald Trump saying those. You could hear at the end of the clip the crowd getting ready to react. There was thunderous applause afterward, so there are still a significant portion of Americans who support that. You know, what came later was the comment by Marco Rubio just a few minutes later when they asked him the same question and he said that he essentially dodged it by saying we shouldn't tell our enemies what we're going to do and we should keep that secret. And I think that's exactly wrong. And I think that points to the problem that we should absolutely be telling our enemies how they will be treated when they, if they're taken prisoner and how we treat people who are in our custody and we treat them humanely and we treat them under the law.

AMT: You know, as the reporting went on and more and more information came out about what was really going on and Donald Rumsfeld was saying we don't, you know, the T-word and we don't do that, it's really important for people to know actually what did go on and to know that there's something else here, that torturers and being tortured in a different way, that you cannot take part in that without also paying a price for it.

ERIC FAIR: Yeah, I am careful about that, because I don't in any way want to suggest that we should focus primarily on the consequences for those of us that tortured. We should always be focusing on the people who are on the other side.

AMT: But a lot of people think you just walk away and you don't.

ERIC FAIR: Yeah. And that's exactly wrong. I mean, I think even when I was in Abu Ghraib and Fallujah and felt that these techniques were justified I knew even then that there'd be, on some level, a price to pay. I just thought it was worth it.

AMT: You have a child?

ERIC FAIR: I do. I have an eight-year-old son.

AMT: What will you tell him about what you did in the war?

ERIC FAIR: A few years ago-- I have my collection of military insignia and coins and things that I collected during the army and I used to have them in a display case, a shiny little display case and as young kid he would be attracted to these and look at them. And I remember seeing that and immediately putting them all away and boxing up the uniforms and so there's very few traces in my house of my military service, simply because I don't want to have that conversation yet. And I don't know. I don't know what I'm going to say to him. Now, the book is out. And it's still going to be obviously a few years before he’s able to read it. But certainly he will at some point. And I expect it will be a very complicated and difficult conversation.

AMT: Eric Fair, thank you.

ERIC FAIR: Thank you.

AMT: Eric Fair is a former interrogator at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. He worked first for a private contractor and then for the US National Security Agency. He also interrogated and tortured, he said, in Fallujah. His new book is Consequence: A Memoir. He joined us from Washington, DC. Let us know what you think of what he's saying. You can email us, cbc.ca/the current. Click on the contact link. Tweet us. We are @thecurrentCBC. Eric Fair on the consequence of torturing for the US government. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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Of Mice and Women: Scientists push to fix gender gap in lab rats for research

Guests: Jeffrey Mogil, Cara Tannenbaum

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Hello, I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and this is The Current. Our next story has to do with the gender gap in the world of science, specifically in the field of biomedical research. And we're not talking about the gender of the scientists, this has to do with the gender of mice and rats studied in experiments. The vast majority of rodents used in research are male and that has some concerned scientists warning that the disparity could be having some serious consequences especially when it comes to women's health. The American National Institutes of Health is trying to fix that gap. New rules this year require researchers to include both male and female animals in their studies to get funding. Similar rules exist in Canada but my next guest says they do not go far enough. Jeffrey Mogil is a neuroscientist and a pain specialist at McGill University and he joins us from Montreal. Hello.

JEFFREY MOGIL: Hi there.

AMT: Can you give us an idea of the scope of this issue? How much more are male mice used than female mice?

JEFFREY MOGIL: Well it depends on the field, but in pain, it's 80 percent of all published studies that use male mice or male rats only. The situation is actually a little bit worse than that because there's a certain percentage that test males and females but never look to see if there's a difference, and there's a certain percentage that simply don't say what the sex of the animals they're using are, which of course means they're using males. This seems to be similar in most other fields in biomedicine with the curious exception being immunology which is exactly the opposite and they only use females.

AMT: And so why are male mice used more?

JEFFREY MOGIL: Well, part of it is just straight inertia. They are used because they've always been used. I think underlying that is an expectation, which is perfectly reasonable, but just turns out to be empirically false so I think what everyone thinks is that because female mice and rats have an estrous cycle, the rodent equivalent to the human menstrual cycle, and that is to say because they have fluctuating gonadal hormone levels, the idea would be that if you used female animals, your data would be messier; more variable. Therefore, you would have to use more animals and that would cost you more money. But, as I said, although that's perfectly reasonable to expect if you actually look to see if data collected in female animals is more variable than data collected in male animals, it turns out that it's not. In fact, if anything the data are more variable in male animals.

AMT: That’s interesting. So why is it so entrenched then?

JEFFREY MOGIL: Scientists are really, really creatures of habit, I think. It's simply a matter of inertia. I'm going to do it the way I was trained to do it and that person does it the way they were trained to do it and it simply continues.

AMT: Is there a resistance to change? Do female mice cost more?

JEFFREY MOGIL: No, they don't cost more. In fact, if anything, they cost less because the demand is less and if you're breeding them yourself, of course half the pups born are going to be female. I really think that people still believe they're just unaware of the data that suggests that what they're worried about they don't need to be worried about. I just think that most scientists just don't know this fact.

AMT: Is that what they call newborn mice, pups?

JEFFREY MOGIL: Pups. Yeah.

AMT: [laughs] I didn't know that. I guess I haven't been studying mice. You did a study on pain in female and male mice that illustrates what we're talking about. Can you tell us about your findings?

JEFFREY MOGIL: Right. Well, we did a study that was looking at circuits that process pain in the spinal cord and one of the newer developments in pain research is the discovery that it's not just the neurons in the spinal cord that are involved, which of course is what we always thought, but in addition to the neurons, there are cells of the immune system, so-called glial cells that are also performing important roles. People have been studying this for about 20 years now and it's quite an active field to study, and it's very exciting to people that new drugs might be developed that work on these glial cells instead of on the neurons and we simply did the same sorts of studies that have been reported in the literature over the past 20 years and found that they all worked in male mice. If you block the glial cells, specifically a cell called microglia, you block pain. Again, this is nothing different than what had been reported in the literature but what we found was that these very same manipulations don't do anything in female mice, they simply don't work at all. The conclusion is that microglia just aren’t involved in the female mice.

AMT: And what are the implications of that?

JEFFREY MOGIL: Well, the implications of that are that any drug development that occurs based on any of this microglia biology, and in fact there have been clinical trials, small clinical trials that have been already performed, our data suggests that those clinical trials will fail and lots of money will be wasted. In the meantime, since females have just as much pain as males, therefore there needs to be a female system that is performing the same function and when we study the male system only, we're not studying this female system from which we could eventually develop analgesic drugs that work on women.

AMT: You say the clinical trials will fail but, that suggests that the clinical trials are using women.

JEFFREY MOGIL: So, it turns out that the clinical trials are mandated by law to use men and women in equal numbers. The problem is that if you develop a drug that actually only works on men, the clinical trial will fail. It will work on the men, it won't work on the women. You average the data together and you end up with something that looks like it doesn't work. Amazingly, I've actually called up some of the researchers that have run these clinical trials and asked them whether their drug works better in men than women, and in a lot of cases they don't know because even though the law requires them to test men and women, it doesn't actually require them to analyze the data to see if gender made a difference.

AMT: That’s fascinating. In other words, you could actually be testing a drug that could be a good drug as a pain drug on men but wouldn't work on women, so you need to find something else for women, but you could actually be using it for men if you had a situation where you needed another pain drug.

JEFFREY MOGIL: Yes, I guess if it worked well enough in men it might actually pass the clinical trial and then you would have a drug out in the world that didn't work on women. Of course, the other possibility is that because it doesn't work on women, it fails the clinical trial and then that drug ends up helping no one and again in the meantime, there are whole different drugs that might work on women that we are never studying and never bringing forward to the point where it reaches a clinical trial.

AMT: That's really important too, when you look at the number of people with chronic pain.

JEFFREY MOGIL: Yes. Exactly, which are women in the clear majority. It's been estimated up to 70 percent of chronic pain patients are women.

AMT: So, what are some of the other consequences of not including female mice in research?

JEFFREY MOGIL: Well, you just don't have a clear picture of the biology that you're claiming to understand. And I think it's more than just a wasted opportunity, it's actually an ethical lapse. We are funded by the public based on the idea that we're going to come up with cures for their diseases and if the clinical population in question is overwhelmingly women, it seems to me we have an ethical duty to study female biology, and of course we're just shirking that duty entirely.

AMT: And do you have specific examples of what this means for women's health care?

JEFFREY MOGIL: The problem is that it's not all that clear because there have been so few studies done on female subjects. We actually don't know the scope of the problem. We do know that drugs that are taken off the market are often done so because the side effects of those drugs were higher in women than in men. So there's lots of reason to suspect that there are major sex differences in all kinds of drugs; those in development and those on the market. But it's very hard to pin down the specifics of it just because the data are lacking.

AMT: And if a drug is taken off the market because the side effects of the drugs are higher in women than in men, is that because they were tested on male mice and they were tested in a country that doesn't have the same demand for women being in clinical trials?

JEFFREY MOGIL: Right. Again, it's impossible to know for sure, but I think that's a perfectly reasonable expectation.

AMT: So what about funding laws in Canada, what's in place here to make sure that female mice are included?

JEFFREY MOGIL: In Canada, when you write a grant to the major funding agencies, which for people like me, is the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, there's a section of that grant where you need to fill in your plan for incorporating sex and gender and, under normal circumstances, this would mean either yes, I plan to use female mice too, or some excuse why you're not going to. And then of course, it's up to the other scientists who read that to see if they think that excuse is valid and that's part of the problem, which is that, well the other scientists they also don't use females in their research and so it's hard to say how that's an effective deterrent. Again, it's not clear and I hope and expect that things are getting a little bit better with time.

AMT: So it's not adequate in your view right now?

JEFFREY MOGIL: Actually, I don't think so. My criticism if I have one, is that these policies are put in with very good intentions and they're policies that I absolutely agree with, I just frankly would like a little more stick and a little less carrot.

AMT: Well, aside from funding policy, what else can be done to shift the researcher mindset?

JEFFREY MOGIL: You know, I sort of hate to fall upon this, but I guess it comes down to education, although in this case it is education of young scientists. The more and more findings like ours that show that if you only use male animals you're going to miss out on this really interesting biology, and frankly get it half wrong, I think that shame is an effective technique in science. Scientists don't like to be proven wrong and if they don't use female animals, they're taking a chance that someone like me is going to come and say that whatever they have found is actually only half true.

AMT: And so all that work will be for naught. That’s pretty good initiative [laughs]. You do see a responsibility of researchers to design studies that includes female mice?

JEFFREY MOGIL: Oh, absolutely. I think there's actually no remaining excuse to not do so. If it really were going to be more expensive to incorporate female mice and rats into your experiments, that would be one thing, but in fact, that's been shown not to be so there really is no excuse remaining that I can think of.

AMT: Well and then the expense on the other side of going through the whole thing and then realizing it doesn't work for one half of the population is a greater expense.

JEFFREY MOGIL: Yes, for sure.

AMT: Jeffrey Mogil, thanks for your time today.

JEFFREY MOGIL: My pleasure.

AMT: Jeffrey Mogil is a neuroscientist and pain specialist at McGill University, he's in Montreal. Well, my next guest is at the head of the organization in charge of implementing the Canadian Government's policy on addressing sex and gender in federally funded research. Cara Tannenbaum is the scientific director of the Institute of Gender and Health at the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. She's also in Montreal, hello.

CARA TANNENBAUM: Good morning.

AMT: How concerned are you about the bias in research that Jeffrey Mogil is talking about?

CARA TANNENBAUM: I'm quite concerned about the bias in research. I think there are a number of things that can go wrong if basic science researchers do not consider having male and female animals in their research. I think, like Jeff said, we will miss opportunities to better understand health and disease. There are many diseases that are more common in women, such as multiple sclerosis, but there are other diseases that are common in boys, like autism. We don't understand why hyperactivity disorders are are more common in boys than in girls, so all these things need to be studied in animals. There's also the risk of doing harm, as Jeff mentioned.

AMT: So tell me a little bit more about the policy in place now to make sure female mice are used more in research.

CARA TANNENBAUM: In 2009, the government of Canada implemented its sex and gender based analysis policy. What this means for the Canadian Institutes of Health Research is that if we're funding research to improve the health of Canadians, that research that addresses men and women, boys and girls and that means doing the research on both male and female animals.

AMT: How do you respond to the fact that the Auditor General of Canada has flagged a concern that the agency isn't doing enough to fix the problem?

CARA TANNENBAUM: Canada takes a slow and deliberate process to fixing problems, which sometimes is a good thing, sometimes perhaps isn't quick enough and suggests that we could be doing better. The policy came out in 2009. Right away in 2010, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research started asking researchers are sex, which are the biologic considerations, taken into account in your study, and are gender? We're not going to talk much about gender today but gender is the socio-cultural context in which men and women live and are they taken into consideration in this study? During the first year, we found that only 25 percent of researchers across Canada studying male and female cells, tissues, animals, in other words basic science research, were taking sex into consideration. That number has risen because of our awareness efforts, to 50 percent and there are other plans being rolled out as we speak right now to make that even better.

AMT: Okay, so you're aware that you have to keep working on it.

CARA TANNENBAUM: We definitely have to keep working on it. What we've done in the past year is we've launched what we call core competency modules or training modules, both for researchers but also for the evaluators of grants, in order to raise the bar on understanding what needs to be considered, how you might take that hormonal fluctuations that Jeff mentioned in female animals, which also occurs in male animals, into consideration, when and why it would be important, and what kind of feedback you can give. When, perhaps it's justified, not to look at it.

AMT: So tell me a little bit more about your thoughts on the implications of this over reliance on male mice and research.

CARA TANNENBAUM: I think we will miss important discoveries if it's not considered. I think that it can lead to harm. There's been a number of signals; drugs that were withdrawn from the market because they caused fatal arrhythmias or sudden death in women only. There's a law that is undergoing regulation right now called Vanessa’s Law--

AMT: I was just going to ask, Prepulsid, right? Vanessa’s Law is related to the daughter of a former MP.

CARA TANNENBAUM: That's correct. So it was MP Terence Young who had a tragedy that propelled him to pass a new law in Canada. Very, very sadly his 15-year-old daughter, Vanessa experienced sudden death because she was on a drug that caused side effects in women and was subsequently withdrawn from the market. It's not clear that that drug was ever tested in female animals. It's definitely not clear that that drug was tested in minors, yet it was prescribed. So, these are things that we would like to avoid. Right now Health Canada has a warning about sleeping pills. Some sleeping pills are being recommended at half the dose for women than men because it was recently discovered that the level of the drug is 45 percent higher in women the next day, which can make them susceptible to car accidents. Were those drugs ever tested in female animals and compared? I don't think we know the answer to that.

AMT: You're talking about the generic Zolpidem, but we know it also as Ambien.

CARA TANNENBAUM: That's correct. Sometimes you don't think about the fact that the side effects are higher in women. We may think that women complain more or are more likely to express their side effects or their anxieties, but the truth may be that these drugs are actually affecting women differently than men.

AMT: So, if these are taken off the market because the adverse effects hadn't shown up before, were they tested in clinical trials with women as well?

CARA TANNENBAUM: Women are included in clinical trials. Certainly not the numbers that we have in our population, so you may have a few hundred or maybe a thousand; the analysis is not necessarily done. These are fairly rare side effects, but when the drug is taken by millions of people, then you end up with a couple of hundred or thousands who experienced the side effects. We don't know if these drugs were tested in female animals. They might have been, but as Jeff pointed out, until recently, and even now we're still struggling, science journal editors do not require that researchers report their results differently from male and female animals. That's another thing that we've been working on to try to change that.

AMT: It’s so interesting because they take so many detailed notes, but they leave that out.

CARA TANNENBAUM: Yes they do. On some occasions, I've asked researchers I notice you're only explaining your results from the male animals, why is that? And they answer, oh we did test it in females, you should be very proud of us, but they didn't show an effect so we thought it would be more interesting to only present the male animal results. [laughs] But that's an important finding.

AMT: Are drug companies changing the way they test? Obviously, if you have to pull something from the market because of adverse effects on women, you've just lost a lot of money. You could have avoided it.

CARA TANNENBAUM: That's a really good point and perhaps it's worthwhile thinking about the history of the scientific approach or paradigm. And science uses the reductionist approach, they try to isolate variables and show that a drug works on a specific system without any, shall we call it noise around it. So, obviously testing in the pre-clinical phase, the new molecule in a male animal is simple. What Jeff didn't mention is that women, well, we tend to get pregnant. And for ethical reasons, I think it was probably meant in the best possible intention that you didn't want to expose the fetus to a new drug. There were a lot of rules in place to not include reproductive-aged women in the clinical trial. That has since been changed, but the culture is slower to change. On the other hand, sick women get pregnant and pregnant women get sick and if we don't have good data or research to show how best to help women in those situations, then we may actually be harming them by using off-label drugs.

AMT: So how do you bring about the cultural shift needed to make sure researchers will include sex and gender in their research design?

CARA TANNENBAUM: I think there are three ways that we can do that. One is the policies that the Canadian Institutes of Health Research are asking, as I mentioned, simply by raising awareness. We've now doubled the numbers of researchers who are including male and female animals. I think that education is key for those who evaluate the grants and decide who gets funded. I think that once the science journal editors start getting stricter about including this data, then people will start reporting it. And the last way we could do this is to hear men and women lobby or talk to the foundations that fund research and ask questions and listen to radio shows like this so that we raise awareness so that when men and women go see their doctor they say was this drug tested for people like me; a man or a woman at my age with my race. We need to start doing this and that will put pressure on government and regulatory bodies to make sure that the clinical trials that come through from drug companies better serve the entire population.

AMT: Well, you just raised another issue and that is race. Can you see a difference in the way a drug might work because of race?

CARA TANNENBAUM: There is some good evidence that blood pressure medications work differently in African-Americans than they do in Caucasians. This, the United States calls its inclusion policy and research, so it's not just a question of men and women, but it's also the question of including minorities. Those may be Hispanic in the United States and Canada, they may be East Asian. People have different genes. Those genes regulate how our body metabolizes the drugs and if we don't test these in diverse and heterogeneous populations, then personalized medicine will never happen.

AMT: And you see personalized medicine as the way of the future?

CARA TANNENBAUM: I think it is the way of the future. When I go into a doctor's office, I want to know that the treatments that are being proposed to me are the best ones for me. It isn't just sex, gender ethnicity, race. We know that socioeconomic status plays a role in health outcomes. We could talk about the First Nations and how they might respond differently because of both genes and environment. These are all excellent points and I hope that we are moving in that direction.

AMT: You have a great deal to keep an eye on then at your institute.

CARA TANNENBAUM: We do, and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research will be launching a specific funding opportunity around personalized medicine in the coming years to see if we could advance this and become a leader in Canada.

AMT: Okay, Cara Tannenbaum, thank you.

CARA TANNENBAUM: Thank you.

AMT: Cara Tannenbaum, Scientific Director of the Institute of Gender and Health at the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. She's in Montreal. What do you think? Not enough female mice in the labs and the consequences of that just spelled out. You can email us, cbc.ca/thecurrent. Click on the contact link. Tweet us we're @thecurrentcbc and let us know what you're thinking as you listen to that and the list of drugs they were talking about as well

[Peppy Music]

AMT: Finally, as part of my earlier conversation with former Abu Ghraib and Fallujah general interrogator, Eric Fair, we mentioned that torture has become a flashpoint in the current Republican presidential race in the United States. We will end things today with both the leading Republican candidates, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump speaking about waterboarding. As well, you will hearthe voice of the current CIA director John Brennan responding to the idea of bringing waterboarding back. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, thanks for listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Senator Cruz, is waterboarding torture?

TED CRUZ: Well, under the definition of torture, no it's not. Under the law, torture is excruciating pain that is equivalent to losing organs and systems, so under the definition of torture, it is not. It is enhanced interrogation. It is vigorous interrogation but it does not meet the generally recognized definition of torture. You can rest assured that as Commander-in-chief, I would use whatever enhanced interrogation methods we could to keep this country safe.

VOICE 1: Senator Cruz, thank you. Mr. Trump, you said not only does it work but that you’d bring it back.

DONALD TRUMP: Well, I'll tell you what. In the Middle East, we have people chopping the heads off Christians, we have people chopping the heads off many other people, we have things that we have never seen before; as a group we have never seen before, what's happening right now. I would bring back waterboarding and I'd bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.

[clapping and cheering]

VOICE 1: Mr. Trump, thank you.

VOICE 2: On the seventh floor of the CIA headquarters in Langley, we met director John Brennan. Never again, Brennan said.

JOHN BRENNAN: We've learned lessons from the past. We have a lot of capabilities and competency and skills and so I don't believe that we need to resort to certain types of tactics like waterboarding. Absolutely, I would not. I would not agree to having any CIA officer. carrying out waterboarding again.

[Extro: Music]

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Apr. 20, 2016 Full Episode Transcript

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