An Introduction by Tom Engelhardt:

Wars come home in strange, unnerving ways -- as Americans have just discovered at Fort Hood. Even before Major Nidal Malik Hasan went on his killing spree, that base, a major military embarkation point for our war zones, was already experiencing the after-effects of eight years of war and repeated tours of duty. The suicide rate at Fort Hood was soaring (with 10 on the base in 2009 alone). Divorce rates were on the rise, as were mental health problems, drug and alcohol use, domestic abuse (up 75% since 2001), and murders among war-zone returnees. Even violent crime in Killeen, the town that houses the base, was up 22% (though it was down, according to the New York Times, "in towns of similar size in other parts of the country"). In an era in which our last president urged Americans to support his Global War on Terror by shopping and visiting Disney World, it often seemed that, except for soldiers and their families, our wars abroad affected little in this country.

And yet for an imperial power past its prime, foreign wars, even ones fought thousands of miles from home, have a way of coming back to haunt. Alfred W. McCoy tends to be ahead of the curve in his writing. In the Vietnam era, he had to fight the CIA to get his book, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, published; in the Bush years, he was perhaps the first person to recognize that the photos from Abu Ghraib represented no anomaly but the product of a long history of CIA torture research -- and published a powerful book, A Question of Torture, on the subject.

His latest book, Policing America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State, meets counterinsurgency, another topic direct from today's headlines, head on. It ends on these lines: "...a state, like the United States, that rules a foreign territory through political repression and pervasive policing soon finds many of those same coercive methods moving homeward to degrade its own democracy. Such are the costs of empire." In his latest TomDispatch post, McCoy lays out just how that impulse for repression and policing, so vividly and violently expressed abroad in these last years, is now quietly taking aim at us.

Human Rights Watch says people seeking redress in Beijing for local injustices have been abducted, detained and abused

Large numbers of Chinese citizens - including children - have been held for days or months in unofficial "black jails" that appear to have emerged when a controversial detention system was abolished, according to a report published today by a human rights group.

Dozens of citizens who had travelled or tried to travel to Beijing to seek redress for local injustices told Human Rights Watch they were instead abducted, detained and in many cases abused in the illicit prisons.

The prison issue received unusual coverage in the domestic media this year when a guard was accused of raping a young detainee - although the carefully worded articles, which did not include the term "black jails", were soon deleted from Chinese websites. The English-language newspaper China Daily reported last week that the guard had pleaded guilty and a verdict was expected within the month.

The privacy of our electronic footprints should be a defining political issue of the internet age

Perhaps good old-fashioned, face-to-face conversation will make a comeback, now the government is pressing ahead with its plan to oblige communications providers to retain details of all our electronic interactions.

While most people can understand the argument that mining such data helps law enforcement and security services, it is nonetheless a proposal that sticks in the throat for many.

During Labour's tenure, the concept of the surveillance state has been introduced with almost as much stealth as the snooping itself. The Tories, recognising public unease, promise to "roll back the surveillance state" and stop the trend for big government databases. If they win power, it will be interesting to see whether or not such intentions are watered down in the harsh reality of tackling the UK's national security challenges.

Police are shutting websites without keeping any records, hampering government efforts to address online extremism, it's been revealed.

The Terrorism Act 2006 granted powers for police to compel web hosts to shut down websites promoting terrorism. But the powers have never been used, and forces have instead persuaded providers to take down websites voluntarily, according to the security minister Lord West.

He told the Lords on Wednesday that he could not say how many websites have been censored because no records have been kept.

"When we passed the Act in 2006, we laid down a requirement to make such records, but it has not really been done," he said.

Drivers, households and holidaymakers should be hit with a carbon tax to tackle global warming, the head of the Environment Agency will say today.

Lord Smith, the former culture secretary, wants to see personal carbon allowances for individuals to cut greenhouse gases by penalising people for using too much fuel.

Every time someone used their car, took a flight or turned their central heating on, their personal allowance would go down.

If it hit zero, they would have to pay to get more carbon credits.