Police List Occupy London As A Terrorist Organization

According to a clandestine memo issued by the London police force, members of the Occupy Wall Street movement are now to be regarded as a terrorist threat.

Occupy London recently moved into a site formerly occupied by the financial corporation UBS. According to the document, fear that the group might expand to other empty buildings around the city, seems to have provoked the elevated status.

The memo (below) was leaked to Occupy London over the weekend by a local businessman and confirmed as genuine on Monday. It starts off by describing international threats from al-Qaeda, FARC in Columbia and terrorists in Belarus.

It then lists activists from the Occupy Wall Street movement as the ‘domestic’ version of these terrorist organizations and states:

“It is likely that activists aspire to identify other locations to occupy, especially those they identify with capitalism. Intelligence suggests that urban explorers are holding a discussion at the Sun Street squat. This may lead to an increase in urban exploration activity at abandoned or high profile sites in the capital.”

“All are asked to be vigilant regarding suspected reconnaissance, particularly around empty buildings. Any sign of access or new markings should also be reported. All are reminded that any encounters with suspected activists could be recorded and then uploaded or live-streamed to the internet.”

“Just the words themselves are enough to deceive the public opinion and this is what we see at the moment,” Occupy spokesman Spyro Van Leemnen told Yahoo! News. “We are clearly nothing to do with extremists or terrorists, we are a peaceful group and we do use direct action to raise our point but definitely not terrorism.

“The building has been abandoned for a good few years now and we think it is crazy for a bank to have it empty and not used when we know at the same time there are so many family homes that have been repossessed. Occupying that building and giving it back to the community is definitely not a terrorist act,” Van Leemnen added.

One is left to wonder when the American government will issue a similar classification. With the recent discovery that violent crackdowns by police on Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in the U.S. were coordinated by City Mayors and their police departments, possibly with the help of federal officials, its likely that it’s already happened.