SCENES

Packed into the film's 102 minutes: U.S. soldiers raping detainees, Jews pocketing pennies, Cubans turning trucks into rafts, blacks playing basketball -- all against a leitmotif of government officers making a mockery of the presumption of innocence because they can't distinguish a pothead from a terrorist.

Quite the turnaround from an entertainment industry that postponed the release of Dave Barry's Big Trouble in 2001 because the comedy was about sneaking a bomb through the Miami airport.

Pop-culture expert Robert Thompson says America gradually got over its squeamishness, through Internet comedy and irreverent Osama bin Laden cartoon characters on shows such as South Park.

It moved on to late-night TV talk-show shticks, defying predictions that ''one horrible day, one horrible attack like that would change the fundamental zeitgeist of our culture,'' says Thompson, who runs the Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University.

`INTERPRETATION'

Harold & Kumar, he says, is just a reflection of the Bush administration's post-9/11 with-us or against-us wars and politics, which some say squandered global goodwill and alienated some Americans as well.

''What it's trying to do is be a humorous, burlesque interpretation of a bunch of stuff that has happened over the past couple of years that isn't any little bit funny,'' Thompson says.

For the record, the Pentagon is not officially commenting on the film, whose release comes as the Defense Department considers death-penalty charges against six Guantánamo captives accused as 9/11 co-conspirators. A spokesman from the building struck by a terrorist plane on Sept. 11 offered that he saw ''nothing funny about 9/11.'' His bosses denied him permission to be quoted with his name attached.

At the base, meantime, the civilian in charge of entertainment says he thinks the film will be received for what it is -- a comedy -- by the servicemen and women who work at the prison camps and other Navy operations there.

''It's like Dumb and Dumber with Arab-looking guys -- just one of those slapstick kind of things that's funny,'' Craig Basel says.

SHOWING ON BASE?

Whether it will be shown at the base's open-air cinema is up to ''Big Navy,'' he says, the headquarters that determine which films to show sailors at Navy bases the world over.

But don't rule it out. Rendition played there last year.

And if its March debut at the South by Southwest festival is any guide, it could develop a following among the guard force of mostly 20-something sailors on assignment at Camp Delta.

Some 1,200 viewers jammed the Austin screening, where festival producer Matt Dentler declared it ''a huge, huge success with both the audience and its critics,'' particularly with the 18-36 demographic.

''It really brought the house down,'' he says.