You wrote:
"I will assume that you do not know SC,"

I do not.

You wrote:
"And so I can tell you, as fact, that she is...from it."

Okay....

"Who among us can say the same?"

I'm not certain I understand what you mean, but:

I would say this about myself. Why would I think of myself in other terms?

You wrote:
"It will be interesting to see if SC's vanguard action in talking to Bob Woodward opens a floodgate of other Bush administration officials who will follow her lead."

Okay; so let's say a genuinely large number of people speak up about this.

You wrote:
"Whatever. Just remember in the days ahead: she is a realist. So she knows the real cost to the decision she made."

You mean the decision to not speak up during while this was going on? Or her decision to speak up because (apparently) she's now out of the reach of Karl Rove and any sock puppets he might deploy?

You wrote:
"Nonetheless, when it mattered -- when she might have stayed mum and retired to oblivion, she made the choice to speak out, and that takes incredible courage."

Guantamo, and all the other black sites, mattered one year ago. It mattered when the Contras were raping and murdering in Nicaragua under Reagan, when Ms. Crawford served under him; and it's mattered every single year in the interim; but it especially mattered over the last eight years while when the entire planet watched America do this.

However: I do not see, from this large (even huge) number of Bushies sprouting a collective conscience, how something changes. I won't be a bit surprised if exactly what you say might happen does happen. In fact, now that I'm prompted to think on it a bit more: I predict it will happen.

So what? Until Bush, Rumsfeld, and Yoo (and perhaps others) stand before the proper court of competent jurisdiction and answer the charges against them, nothing has changed.

As to the idea of cost born by Ms. Crawford:I believe that any "real cost" is born by people close to power and who, in the midst of such a thing and facing power, refuse to countenance evil at the time it is happening. Susan Crawford did not, whatever other character strengths she possesses. Evil has left the building, and taking pot shots at its butt with a scoped sniper rifle hardly expresses resistance.

I believe that large numbers of us (and, from what I can tell, pretty much all of the Bush cronies) are pretending that this use of torture is a New Thing; something inimical and alien to the American experience; and it's this that Yoo, and Bush, and Cheney know and exploit: "What we do is not torture." The "we" there is not limited to the Bush Cabal: it implies us, as in me, you, and Susan Crawford.

It's as if some sort of collective meme experience has taken over, offering us a fake vista of "well, hmmm...didn't see that there before"; where the fact of the matter is that torture has been there, in America, all along; it's just now being subject to some degree, or amount, or quality, of metaphorical sunlight.

Thank you for reading my post, and best regards.