By telephone from Boston this summer, Bowman said he took the show to America after sellout performances in Dublin, Belfast, Galway and Edinburgh -- blending his opposition to U.S. detention policy with an emerging career as a stand-up comic.

"I do think that Guantánamo is un-Christian, " he said. "Jesus said, 'What you do to the least of these you do also to me.' So, if you believe that, in a sense he is in Guantánamo."

Bowman, 26, comes from the Irish Catholic side of the great divide in his homeland. His grandparents, he said, were practicing Catholics. His parents chose agnosticism. And he declares himself an atheist.

The thesis is, as a Palestinian willing to die for his cause, he winds up in indefinite detention in southeastern Cuba and ruminates on U.S. policy.

But dressing up as Christ himself and quoting God?

"People say it's blasphemous. But I say it's not as blasphemous as torturing people."

For the record, the Pentagon and prison camps spokesmen describe the treatment of captives as humane. Vice President Dick Cheney point-blank told Larry King Live recently, "We don't do torture."

All "enhanced techniques for interrogation, " he added, are carried out with permission of Congress.

Still, the perception of mistreatment has become synonymous with the place and the practice of indefinite detention at Guantánamo.

In mainstream movie houses, Michael Moore bobs just beyond the base in his latest leftist shock documentary, Sicko, making the military's isolated offshore mission a metaphor for American health inequities.

Moore has set up the scene by reminding moviegoers that the Pentagon has long boasted that it provides top-notch, free universal healthcare to Guantánamo captives -- a wily juxtaposition to his central theme of why the White House can't cure the national healthcare crisis.

"Permission to enter. I have three 9/11 rescue workers, " Moore says. "They just want some medical attention -- the same kind that the evildoers are getting."

He doesn't get inside.

And neither does the film. The prison camps spokesman, Haupt, said in an e-mail from at-times isolated Guantánamo that Sicko has not been shown among first-run movies screened nightly at two open-air cinemas on the 45-square-mile base.

"We've not yet seen the movie here, either in our theaters or on DVD, " he replied to a query, "but have read the reviews."