The latest tweaks to Google News make it a lot more useful for my random news-gathering needs. Instead of a standard selection of headlines and topics, I can now tell Google to present me with a few stories on Biotech, Latin America, European politics, and so on. I have some specific areas of interest that are outside the usual headline realm, so it's cool being having them integrated into my morning home page hit.

This morning, the Google-Magic served up an unsettling story from the Kansas City Star. Intellectuals back Cuba over rights record, the headline said, and I figured there must be something fishy. Cuba, after all, has a pretty crummy human rights record. Its long history of persecuting and imprisoning dissidents and reporters is well known. Armando Valladares' excellent Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag is an excellent example. Further examination of the story proved distressing.

HAVANA - About 200 intellectuals, activists and artists from Latin America and elsewhere issued a letter Monday urging the top United Nations human rights watchdog to side with Cuba in an expected battle over the communist country's rights record. A U.S.-backed resolution to condemn the island's record is usually presented at every spring meeting in Geneva of the U.N. Human Rights Commission, which this year was to open Monday and run through April 22.
...
"We urge the governments of the commission's member countries to not permit (the resolution) to be used to legitimize the anti-Cuban aggression of the administration of (President) Bush," the letter said. The letter said the U.S. government has no moral authority to criticize Cuba's human rights record after its own scandals over treatment of terror suspects at prisons in Iraq and the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay.

Now, friends of mine know that I'm no fan of the Bush administration, and I feel strongly about the human rights violations we've committed in the name of 'security.' In addition, I think the Cuban embargo is an exercise in vindictive narcissism. If we're morally obligated to cut off trade to Cuba, we should certainly do the same with China, Saudi Arabia, and so on. It's not as if the nation is any sort of threat to us.

But the moment "intellectuals" and "artists" start whitewashing Cuba's genuinely atrocious human rights record in hopes of scoring points against an American administration they dislike, they become the very same ethically blind caricatures they claim to hate. The fact that Howard Zinn is one of the guys in this group is no shock -- he's a very vocal opponent of the classic "narrative" of American history, and works to document the uglier side of our nation's expansion. I know how tempting it is to look at American exceptionalism, the sense of rightness that pervades our country's policies, and try to turn the tables. "Hey! Maybe the other side is really the good guys! Maybe we're the bad guys!" goes this line of thought. It's compelling, and in some situations this can be quite true. Westward expansion, displacement of Native Americans, stuff like that... it's ugly ugly stuff.

It's perfectly acceptable to speak out against both Cuban human rights violations and U.S. human rights violations. Protesting the hypocrisy of the U.S. in introducing this resolution while it runs its own controversial prisons at Gitmo is also a good thing. But elevating a nation or a person because the U.S. opposes them is crossing the moral and ethical line. You've put "scoring points against your enemies" above "defending the innocent."

In other news, searching for the news about the president of Sierra Leone yielded the best Google Ad ever: