Au Pair - Armagh

Waterboarding

"Physical violence usually precedes waterboarding, a sort of softening of the victim’s belly. I was stripped, beaten, deprived of sleep, water and food, and forced to lie on the floor, feet raised with my head slightly below the level of my feet. A piece of soaked cloth was thrown on my face, and fetid water was poured through the cloth to slowly drip into my mouth. This technique causes the fluid to build in your lungs. A key element of waterboarding is the ability to bring the interrogated to the verge of death without actually killing the person. That is what makes a good “interrogator.” I was lucky in this regard; my torturers were masters of their trade....
  
Waterboarding, like other torture methods, makes you talk. You talk a lot; say anything, absolutely anything to get the torture to stop. You throw up a lot, you talk, you scream like a demented person whenever you can, and you throw up again. You give all the answers you think your torturer wants, and more, but not much is true, precise, actionable intelligence. Torture transforms the victim into a fanatical and fierce opponent. Torture taught me the most corrosive diseases of the soul: hatred and revenge." (source)

Fabiola - Part Four

The young man, Gallus, watched the strange girl at a distance. The girl who insisted on wearing a soldier's robe over her white, wool-embroidered linen dress. Even from there, leaning against one of the arched columns of High Priest's Road, nestled among the fruit vendors, he could see the curls of Fabiola's hair peaking out from under her loose head scarf. Although she'd never looked at him, and perhaps did not even know he existed, Gallus could imagine returning to those intense brown eyes.
 
He took note of her leisurely walking pace as she moved closer and closer towards him, and examined her gestures for signs of who she was below those folds of cloth and beneath that soft, tan skin. Would her hand always feel so warm? Would she notice him? She seemed to notice everything else around her, as her eyes moved slowly and carefully from objects to persons to the open windows above the busy street. The modest, silent girl he coveted at dinner and fantasied about at night had opened herself now. In this moment of revelation, he could see that something about the old beggar woman had troubled her. Thoughtful yet alert, she strolled by him, oblivious.
 
Fabiola, meanwhile, flanked by her anxious servants, was thinking about property. She was thinking about money. It reminded her of stories that she'd heard at dinner regarding the man across the sea who had submit himself to fatal torture in order to erase all debts. What a strange thing to have done, she thought. This seemingly endless debt won't be paid until the wandering gods themselves collapse from exhaustion, destroying Fortune. Before that day, man will continue to prey upon man. And bodies will continue to disembark from ships docked along a river silted with the hopeless, penniless dead.
 
It was in thinking such thoughts that Fabiola decided that she was going to sneak out of her room that night and see how those bodies lived.

Metal Gear Solid V - The Phantom Pain

Aw yesssss. The torture of scantily clad women, child soldiers, water boarding, cruel imprisonment, murder, unanaesthetized surgery, cowboys in Afghanistan, hiding behind horses, sneaking around, 'real-time weather', the simultaneous glamorization and criticism of violence and war, and a guy named Skull Face. What the fuck else do you want? Like, really? What? Nothing. There is nothing else.

David Luban - Liberalism, Torture, and the Ticking Bomb

"But the pressure of liberalism will compel them to think about it in a highly stylized and artificial way, what I will call the 'liberal ideology of torture.' The liberal ideology insists that the sole purpose of torture must be intelligence gathering to prevent a catastrophe; that torture is necessary to prevent the catastrophe; that torturing is the exception, not the rule, so that it has nothing to do with state tyranny; that those who inflict the torture are motivated solely by looming catastrophe, with no tincture of cruelty; that torture in such circumstances is, in fact, little more than self-defense; and that, because of the associations of torture with the horrors of yesteryear, perhaps one should not even call harsh interrogation 'torture.'
 And the liberal ideology will crystalize all of these ideas in a single, mesmerizing example: the ticking time bomb."(source)