About a dozen anti-war protesters were arrested today during demonstration against President Bush’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly.

“I want Bush and Cheney arrested,” a protester who knelt on the sidewalk before being handcuffed, Ben Maurer, said.

The arrestees were among about 400 people opposing the Bush administration’s war in Iraq, and its incarceration in Guantanamo Bay of more than 300 men on suspicion of terrorism or links to Al Qaeda or the Taliban. Many in the crowd wore orange jumpsuits in solidarity with the Guantanamo detainees.

The protesters demonstrated near the United Nations and then marched downtown, accompanied by a heavy police escort, for another rally at Washington Square Park.

“I’m sick to my stomach about the war in Iraq,” Anastasia Gomes, 22, of Queens, said. “We as the youth are standing up and saying this president does not represent us.”

The crowd was a mix of college students and veterans of anti-Vietnam War protests.

“I’ve been doing this for 40 years,” Gail Lindenberg, 58, of Manhattan, said. “I’m very troubled that for many years the United States as an international power continues with very little resistance.”

Members of the anti-war group Code Pink symbolically arrested a person wearing a Bush mask and chanted, “What do we say? Arrest the criminal!”

The protesters shouted “End the war!” and “Defend the Constitution!” as they marched to Washington Square Park.

Office workers and tourists watched as the demonstrators paraded past Grand Central Terminal and the New York Public Library.

“We see that the Americans don’t like Bush,” a visitor from Cologne, Germany, Tina Schmitz, said. “I think it’s OK that people say what they think.”

A woman on her lunch break from a midtown fast food restaurant, Yolanda Brown, said she wished she could join the protest.

“I never voted for Bush,” she said. “What is the war for? Nothing.”