i do. it's not physical pain, but emotional torture is just as cruel and inhumane to me.
as a matter of fact, GW also say that what they're doing in Guantanamo and even Abu Graib is "not torture" because they're not out right physical torture.
My point is that I don't think what he did to her was actually torture or terribly inhumane either. She was simply interrogated and kept in a cell for a few days. She was certaintly fed and the extreme was her believing she might die by firing squad. This was not to make merry from the thought of that event as a torturer would do, rather to get her over a wall she could not scale prior.
It was a form of deprivation, a test, an exercise if you will, and he did NOT succeed at breaking her spirit. In truth he was protecting her from the regime during that incarceration period while forcing her into self-examination and analysis to gain strength for the revolution he knew was coming. What he did was a service to her. He just helped shed what was left of the old Evie--afraid, hiding, running--and then rebuilt her into a creature without fear and possessing a center of gravity. He did not succeed at taking away her identity and will during this episode, rather he forced her to find it herself and it became more powerful. And then she was set free, not only psycholgically but free into the world. She was no longer dependent on him, oppressed by the government or her own limiting beliefs and fears.
What happened at Guantanamo and Abu Graib is something opposite, which is making sport out of something dehumanizing and sordid strictly to wield gross abuses of "authority." It's not the same thing as what V did in any way, or at least in my book. V would never have let Evie be truly harmed in that he loved her chastely and she became indispensible to him. He desired to empower her, to make her flower fully, to wake her up and then set her free.
Much like Jeff Bridges in the great Peter Weir film Fearless, about plane crash survivors trying to integreate back into daily life, she learned through this episode that she had experienced something that transcended fear itself, and was now impervious, and could not go back.