The only bright spot in the Iraq war, within Iraq, is that it's so bad that any modest step in the direction of human rights or even common sense would be an improvement. If the U.S. forces or "diplomatic" corps in Baghdad want to help that city, they might try visiting the jails and releasing Sunni women and other Iraqi women to their families.

In yet another ghastly sign of the horror that invading Iraq has unleashed on the helpless Iraqis, many women are among the prisoners held without charges in Iraqi prisons. At a time when the decimated Iraqi middle class and the remaining infrastructure and the trashed Baghdad neighborhoods need all the help they can get, many women are being held in a Baghdad prison that is a model of what not to do what for human rights, according to a news report.

Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi toured the prison and "found the jail overcrowded," with "many women afflicted with contagious diseases" from lack of medical care.

Hashemi's office issued an official statement on the illegal incarcerations themselves and on conditions in the prison.

The statement also said that the women had evidently been taken as basically hostages because their husbands or relatives were suspected of being involved in resistance.

Since polls now show that a majority of Iraqis support or would support resistance -- the predictable reaction to an invasion, in any country -- targets for any sweep of "insurgents" must be abundant.

It is heartbreaking to recall that Iraq, according to one of those too-rare articles in the New York Times that actually reported something accurately during the run-up to the war, had one of the most progressive and secular female populations in the Middle East before the invasion and occupation.

" One women prisoner, Suaad Aziz, told Hashemi that she was arrested while looking for her son who had disappeared for more than one year.

"I was a principal of a school in the Amiriya district of Baghdad. They have sentenced me to death and no one has ever asked me a single question why I was here," the statement reported Aziz as saying."