Over 30 protesters gathered in front of the Terrace Theater on Monday, Sept. 20 to demand the arrest of former President George W. Bush, who visited the theater that night as part of its Distinguished Speakers Series.
The Downtown Long Beach protest followed a similar demonstration in Beverly Hills the night before, where Bush spoke at the Saban Theatre.
Pat Alviso, national coordinator for Military Families Speak Out and mother of an active duty Marine, addressed the crowd during the protest.
“This mom is really mad,” Alviso said. “I mean I’m really mad. I couldn’t believe it. When I first heard that George [W.] Bush was coming to my town I was just sickened. Shame on you Long Beach Terrace Theater, and all your patrons who think it is okay to invite a man like George [W.] Bush who’s been responsible for all this death to be a distinguished speaker in my town.”
Tickets to attend the event cost between $210 to $615.
She listed the names of her friends who had lost children who served in the armed forces, along with the names of their late children.
“Their children were killed because of your lies,” Alviso said in regard to Bush.
The crowd clapped and cheered in response to a reference by Alviso to the infamous incident in 2008 in which Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi threw his shoes at Bush during a press conference.
“Y’all remember what this is about?” Alviso asked the crowd as she took off her shoe and raised it in the air.
Ian Matthews of the Answer Coalition was in middle school when the United States invaded Afghanistan.
“As a child it was unclear to me what the connection was, people couldn’t explain it to me, adults,” Matthews said. “And this guy, he said they hated our freedom. That doesn’t make any sense. Afghanistan didn’t attack the World Trade Center. So what good was it supposed to do to attack and bomb the people of Afghanistan? After 20 years the answer is perfectly clear—None.”
The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan recently ended with the withdrawal of troops under President Joe Biden’s administration. After the U.S. withdrew its troops, the country fell to the Taliban in a matter of days, triggering an influx of Afghan refugees desperately trying to leave Afghanistan.
Under Bush’s presidency, the U.S. armed forces invaded Afghanistan after 9/11 purportedly as part of the “war on terror” to avenge those lost in the terrorist attack.
Saudi Arabian terrorist leader Osama bin Laden and his group al-Qaeda were using Afghanistan as a base of operations during the planning of the 9/11 attacks.
But according to a 2004 report by the U.S. government, none of the hijackers who carried out the 9/11 attacks were from Afghanistan, with the majority of them hailing from Saudi Arabia.
“I remember that it was under the Bush Administration that I felt the most guilt,” said Navy veteran Louis Raprager of Veterans for Peace. “It was Bush’s orders that sent me, or that sent us, to a 20-year path of vengeance against a civilian population and a sovereign nation in Afghanistan even after the Taliban offered to turn over the culprits of 9/11.”
In 2001 the Taliban offered to hand over Osama bin Laden on the conditions the U.S. would stop bombing Afghanistan and provide the Taliban with proof that bin Laden was involved in planning the 9/11 attacks. The offer was rejected by Bush.
According to the Costs of War project by Brown University, 46,319 Afghan civilians have died as a direct result of the war from October 2001 to August 2021.
The war in Afghanistan also cost the U.S. approximately $2.3 trillion, according to the same project.
“It is because of these orders, and the same feelings that arose in me […] of being complicit in these wars, that my friends and community members have taken their own lives,” Raprager said. “It is because of these experiences that I cannot see them, I cannot talk to them. I cannot wash away the memories of these experiences with a frosty one with any of my friends. Bush saw to that.”
According to the veteran-led and founded organization Stop Soldier Suicide, 114,000 veterans have killed themselves since 2001, making suicide the second-leading cause of death for post-9/11 veterans.
The evening before his speech at the Terrace Theater on Sept. 20, Bush also gave a speech at the Saban Theatre in Beverly Hills.
Both speeches were interrupted by protesters.
Mike Prysner, a war veteran and organizer for the ANSWER Coalition, interrupted the Beverly Hills speech by Bush.
In a video posted on social media, Prysner stands and begins to yell at Bush while security struggles to remove him.
“You lied about Iraq being a threat. You sent me to Iraq. You sent me to Iraq in 2003. My friends are dead […] You killed people. You lied. You lied about WMDs [weapons of mass destruction]. A million Iraqis are dead because you lied. My friends are dead because you lied. You need to apologize,” Prysner yelled at Bush as he was forced out of the theater.
The following night in Long Beach activist Jeb Sprague interrupted Bush again. The incident was not recorded but according to a tweet by Sprague he told Bush, “Your war destroyed my cousin’s life. Your war created a nightmare for my family. He’s a shell of his former self. Tens of thousands of Americans and a million Iraqis have died. You used white phosphorus, a chemical weapon, in Fallujah. Arrest this man. Arrest this war criminal.”
According to Sprague, he was briefly detained and then released by authorities.
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