Think of it this way: Remember how you spent Christmas, Chanukah, or New Year’s Eve in 2001. Recall all the holidays since then. Imagine having spent them, and all the ordinary days and nights in between, in an 8-by-6-by-8 cage on a military base in Cuba, with frequent, sometimes painful, interrogations – and no hope of going home.

That’s life in Guantanamo Bay. Since the start of the Afghanistan war, Camp X-Ray and a new facility, Camp Delta, have housed some 600 or 700 prisoners. (No one’s really sure – outside the Pentagon, I mean.) Some were captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan during firefights against Americans; some have worked for Al Qaeda elsewhere.Yemeni man admitted as much in court yesterday.

“Look, I hold no brief for many of these people,” Senator McCain told CNN after touring the prison last year. “I am convinced that they are terrorists who are bent on the destruction of the United States of America.”

Of course, not all the detainees were picked up in Afghanistan, or on a real or virtual battlefield. Many were arrested, deemed enemy combatants (a term that does not appear in the Geneva Conventions),and locked up without having their exact charges revealed, even to them, even now.

“I do believe that every human being deserves a right to have their case decided, either to put them on trial for their crimes or to release them,” said Mr. McCain in the same interview. “There are many of them that need to be put on trial. In my opinion, from what I’ve seen, and there are many of them that need to be released.”

Some detainees have been released to their home countries (of which there are more than 40); hundreds remain, and the intelligence-gathering continues. Only the due process demanded by the Supreme Court earlier this summer seems likely to improve the situation. At a protest on the steps of the Court in March, the father of one of the detainees said, “I do not plead for mercy, I ask for justice. Before mercy comes justice.”

Without any charges being filed against them, five British detainees were set free earlier this year. Their statements form the basis of “Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom,” which opened at the Culture Project last night. Parents, lawyers, detainees in orange jumpsuits – all offer harrowing tales of life in the jails; actors are also trotted out to repeat the defenses of officials like Donald Rumsfeld and Jack Straw.

The British slant to the production is a legacy of its roots. It arrives by way of the tiny Tricycle Theater and the West End, where it seems to have set every stiff upper lip quivering with rage. The show seems unlikely to do the same here; it fails to realize its noble intentions.

The script has been assembled from spoken evidence by Victoria Britain, a longtime journalist at the Guardian, and the novelist Gillian Slovo. It has been directed by Nicolas Kent (who conceived the original idea) and Sacha Wares. The four of them have achieved neither an especially insightful consideration of the issues, nor a moving depiction of the human casualties. It’s ineffective as drama, despite its intensely dramatic raw material.

A friend in Britain assures me the London production featured uniformly strong acting; something closer to the opposite is true here. (The only remarkable thing about the American cast is the waywardness of its accents.) The set, a sprawling grid of chairs, tables, cots, and cages along either wall, seems designed to dilute focus.

The show deserves credit for avoiding hysterics (though two unwarranted analogies to Nazi camps are made) and for intellectual honesty. A man who lost his sister on September 11 acknowledges that the detainees aren’t all innocents. (“Guantanamo” isn’t a Michael Moore swipe.) And of course it’s admirable that somebody tries to cast any light at all on the issue.

But the impact falls vastly short of what it should, failing to rival what even journalism has achieved. It’s not as thoughtful as Jeffrey Toobin’s evenhanded piece earlier this year in the New Yorker, nor remotely as powerful as Anthony Lewis’s essay in the New York Review of Books last month. For all its shortfalls, the anti-death-penal ty show “The Exonerated” proved a more damning brief against a government injustice.

In particular, the playwrights don’t crystallize the extent to which the detentions show what happens when security and civil liberties collide, and security wins. They might have included another ringing defense of the need to accept a certain lack of security in a free society. Amid the looting and lawlessness in newly liberated Baghdad, Mr. Rumsfeld said, “Stuff happens. … It’s untidy, and freedom’s untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.” Spoken like a true civil libertarian.