CIA Director Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden confirmed Tuesday for the first time that the United States had used the interrogation technique known as waterboarding three times.

Those waterboarded included:

• Abu Zubaydah, the man who planned the unsuccessful 2000 milennium attack on Los Angeles International Airport.
• Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who masterminded the attack on the USS Cole that resulted in the deaths of 17 U.S. sailors.
• Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks and the man who brutally beheaded journalist Daniel Pearl.

The revelation that these three terrorist masterminds had water poured on their cloth-covered faces for no more than a minute or two prompted Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Terrorists) to go ballistic.

That prompted Sen. Dick Durbin, the Senate's No. 2 Democrat and a member of the Judiciary Committee, to call on the Justice Department to open a criminal inquiry into whether past use of waterboarding violated any law. The Pentagon has banned its employees from using waterboarding to extract information from detainees, and FBI Director Robert Mueller said his investigators do not use coercive tactics in interviewing terror suspects.

Durbin, already frustrated with Attorney General Michael Mukasey's refusal last week to define waterboarding a form of torture as critics have, said he would block the nomination of the Justice Department's No. 2 official if the criminal inquiry isn't opened.

It was a particularly sharp threat by Durbin, who represents Illinois _ the same state that U.S. District Judge Mark Filip of Chicago, the deputy attorney general nominee, calls home.

"In light of the Justice Department's continued non-responsiveness to Congress on the issue of torture, including your disappointing testimony on waterboarding last week, I have reluctantly concluded that placing a hold on Judge Filip's nomination is my only recourse for eliciting timely and complete responses to important questions on torture," Durbin wrote in a letter to Mukasey on Tuesday.

He added: "A Justice Department investigation should explore whether waterboarding was authorized and whether those who authorized it violated the law."

That's right, Dick Durbin cares a lot more about a little psychological stress on mass murderers than he does about protecting U.S. citizens from getting killed. Durbin is a disgusting human being who apparently won't be satisfied until more Americans die needlessly, just so he stops getting annoying phone calls from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

The man belongs on the sidewalk outside the Berkeley Marine Corps recruiting office with the Code-Pinkos and not in the U.S. Senate.

I continue to be annoyed by politicians demands that waterboarding be "declared" illegal by the administration when that's something the Congress can do on its own, but hasn't had the inclination to.