DEMONSTRATORS rallied at a makeshift detention centre dubbed “Guantanamo on the Hudson” yesterday after a night of skirmishes outside the Republican Convention in New York led to almost 1,000 arrests.

The former bus garage on Pier 57 on the Hudson River in Manhattan has been converted into a holding pen and is now crowded with protesters picked up during street battles with police during a day of “direct action”.

“In that building, there are pens 10-12ft wide ringed by concertina wire and they are putting 30 to 40 people into the pen at a time,” Katya Komisaruk, a lawyer from the National Lawyers’ Guild, said. She added that she had been barred from meeting detainees.

“The people in that building have been chanting: ‘We want to see our lawyers. We want to see our lawyers’,” she said. “Their cellphones have been taken from them.”

United for Peace and Justice, the group which called the demonstration, said that the building contained asbestos and spilt oil from its former use. One woman who had to sleep on the ground, the group said, was taken to hospital because of reaction to a chemical beneath the concrete floor.

The arrests came as protesters converged on police barricades surrounding the Republican convention at Madison Square Garden in Manhattan on Tuesday night. Marching without permits, the demonstrators quickly fell foul of police at several assembly points, including the New York Public Library, Union Square and “Ground Zero”. Hundreds more were picked up when they tried to stage a “die-in” on a street near Madison Square Garden.

The raucous crowd, chanting “Whose Streets? Our Streets”, spat on Republican delegates, hurled traffic cones at cars, tipped over a fruit barrow and set fire to a traffic light. Groups broke off and ran down sidestreets, pursued by police.

Among those picked up was Jamal Holiday, 19, who was filmed punching and kicking a detective during the first outbreak of violence at a demonstration on Monday.

Michael Bloomberg, the Republican Mayor of New York, issued a warning: “You break the law, you’re going to find yourself arrested.”

A small group of Aids activists penetrated the tight security at Madison Square Garden yesterday by carrying “Texas for Bush” placards to a session of young Republicans. When they began blowing whistles and chanting “Bush kills” on the convention floor, the Secret Service dragged them from the hall and made 11 arrests.

Protesters complained of police tactics of dispersing crowds by driving mopeds into people and of making arrests by encircling people in large orange plastic nets.

“Nets are not to be used to capture human beings,” Tanya Mayo, of the protest group Not In Our Name, said. “As an African-American I have seen a legacy of using nets, starting with slavery in America, to capture human beings.”

Bruce Bentley, of the National Lawyers’ Guild, which is sending green-capped “legal observers” on to the streets to document police behaviour, said that 14 of its monitors had been arrested in the police dragnet.

Detainees were held for up to 30 hours before being presented to a judge, he said. Police said that most of the delays were due to the fact that arrested protesters were refusing to identify themselves.

In all, some 1,700 people had been arrested since the protest began with Aids activists stripping naked in the street last Thursday, more than were arrested during the violent demonstrations at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968.

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