Well, to clear up a few issues - we're affirming the motion, I'm a female, and j_p, if you call me an impressionable child again.... ... I'm almost 17....
I was thinking about it this morning. I could only come up with a few things.
Firstly is the fact that you have to make a comparison between what they do to terrorists held there, and what the terrorist groups those terrorsists belong to actually do. Alright, fine - say prisoners at GB are being sleep-deprived. This - although unpleasant, often leads to them divluging required information. What the terrorist groups would do was a lot worse - they would put them in cages and drop concentrated nitric acid randomly every 5 minutes through the top bars so that the prisoner would have to keep moving around, resulting in sleep deprivation. In one case, it's used as a measure to extract information. In the other, it's pure sadism. I'm aware of the fact that this argument is insubstantially weak, but meh...
Second - is there any actual evidence that the atrocious stories are as common as they're portrayed to be, or is this another case of media hyperbole that's lost its grounding and been blown out of proportion? Are we talking widespread torture here or is it just a few isolated incidents? Because if it's the latter (there's gotta be something out there to justify it. There always is, these days), then we can state that we support the measures used at GB because in reality, their basis is similar to that of most other terrorist-prisoner facility.
It all comes back to the issue of whether the means justifies the end.... at least the moot wasn't "That we support the measures used at Abu Ghraib"....
