But the international standard is that when you do not abide by the Geneva Conventions you are subject to the domestic policies of the nation holding you. Therefore when we, with Congressional oversight, waterboarded a few people, it was consistent with all domestic and international standards.
Sure we could have just treated them as POW's if we wanted to, but it was not wrong to not do so.
As for international agreements, you are citing a Convention that has requirements to met in order to fall under it, and a non-binding human rights resolution. The reason it passed as it did is because it was non-binding.
We did abide by all of our legal binding agreements.
You'd think it was my job or something. 
No, I do not feel that waterboarding the known masterminds of terror attacks was bad.
Actually it is not always illegal, but that is a different issue. But generally, targeting civilians is illegal yes.
That is interesting seeing as how we drew up plans for first strike scenarios regularly. Why would we do that if we did not at least hold it as an option? However, regardless of reason, according to you targeting civilians is illegal, therefore you are either 1) admitting that targeting civilians is OK, or 2) arguing that circumstances can change manner in which we act.
Every President "lies." I believe that they acted on bad information, but I am not yet convinced that they openly lied with the intent to go to war.
We could have called them whatever and treated them however sure.
Torture is generally wrong, but why are you harping on bound and defenseless? Do you believe it is OK if they are not in that state?
Bush/Cheney and a Bi-Partisan Congress chose how we treated them.
We have tried those who were responsible for unauthorized torture actions.
Nuclear parity is not as important as the credibility of our extended deterrence. As it stands, the US is thousands of warheads behind the Russians. We keep taking down the strategic warhead levels, but we never change the theater numbers. We currently have a few hundred of those, the Russians have around 4,000. In terms of extended credibility, numbers like that start to matter. The point is not how many times can you destroy the world, it is how credible is your deterrent and how many survivable weapons do you have?
I'd like to have a conversation with your wife, my field is defense strategy, could make for an interesting conversation.
No terrorist group is upset that we waterboarded anyone. Further, none of these groups are going to cite that as their "beef" with the US. All of these groups were already upset about something else we did.
I am not sure image is what is going to maintain our dominance, but image will ebb and flow, we should focus on economics and military.
