In the open source world, the old saying is something like, “Given thousands of eyes, all bugs are shallow.” A similar truth holds for the blogosphere. A reader of Billmon’s weblog discovered an online diary from a contractor at Abu Ghraib (the prison in Iraq where American soldiers tortured prisoners, perhaps at the behest of intelligence agencies and civilian contractors). That diary mentioned the name of another contractor at the prison, which was noteworthy in that an Army general investigating abuses at the camp had recommended that he be fired two months before he was mentioned in the journal. The story that the abuse was the work of a few, low ranking bad eggs is just BS. Details here. Anyway, without the huge horde of webloggers, and commenters on weblogs, this story would not have broken, at least not as soon as it did.