The waterboarding controversy should end with a whimper. It probably won’t, but it should.

Attorney General Michael Mukasey has studied U.S. interrogation methods, as he committed to do in his confirmation hearings. On Tuesday, he submitted a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee that should comfort critics and satisfy the rest of us.

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Bottom line: The United States does not currently use waterboarding as a tactic to derive intelligence. There is, moreover, no expectation that waterboarding will be added to the menu of interrogation methods, a process that would involve several unlikely steps.

Of course, war critics and anti-torture activists will never be satisfied. Too many of them are more invested in further inflating yesterday’s legal quarrels than preparing for tomorrow’s national security needs. But for people of good will — those who concede that there have always been strong arguments on both sides of this debate — it’s time to let go.

Let’s take a step back. Credible reporting — which is not addressed in the attorney general’s letter — indicates that waterboarding has been used on no more than three of the thousands of detainees the United States has held, long and short term, since military operations against radical Islam began over six years ago. Assuming (as I do), that it was used on those three (all top-tier al-Qaeda operatives), the same credible reporting also tells us the tactic has not been used in over four years.

So we did it an infinitesimal number of times, we haven’t done it in years, we don’t currently do it, the regulations in place don’t permit it, and it seems inconceivable that future regulations will alter that.

Is this issue really worth scandalizing ourselves over?

Is it really worth intimidating our intelligence officers with the fear of prosecution and consuming days upon days of the legislative calendar (including confirmation hearings) over waterboarding?

How can it be that people who claim to worry so much about America’s reputation in the world think they somehow advance that reputation by obsessing over something that virtually never happens, and in the process libeling our government as a programmatic torturer?

I’m not a fan of the Bush administration’s democracy project, but isn’t there something ironic in the fact that the United States since 2001 has freed 50 million people from tyrannical regimes, yet all the “America’s reputation” crowd seems to want to talk about is waterboarding — three instances, or, if you like, one waterboarding of a complicit terrorist for every thousand innocent people killed on 9/11?