This paper builds upon previous work that has sought to use ontological security to understand problematic and violent state practices, and how they relate to the securitizing of identity. Yet like much (although not all) work which has utilized it in International Relations theory, the application of ontological security theory (OST) to state ‘drives’ has provided only a superficial unpacking of ‘the state’. Further, while OST scholars have examined environmental or background conditions of ‘late modernity’, and how these conditions facilitate anxiety and uncertainty for agents, the content of such factors can be further explicated by placing OST in conversation with one particular systemic account. Alongside ‘the state’ and ‘late modernity’, the paper therefore explores several complementary sites shaping the ontological security seeking process of, within and around states. The paper reads the 2000s re-embrace of torture by the United States by examining ontological security alongside: (1) the structural level via Laura Sjoberg’s ‘gender–hierarchical’ argument; (2) the routinized organizational processes (via Graham Allison) of the US intelligence community and specifically the Central Intelligence Agency; and (3) the narrated interplay between public opinion and elite discourses.