Detainee's Letters Give Peek at Life At Guantanamo

"But in some way this place is still better and in some way other were better," he wrote.

Gitanjali Gutierrez, a lawyer who has been seeking access to Khan, said the redactions, although expected, raised questions. "So many of the interrogation techniques are already known," said Gutierrez, a lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents many detainees at Guantanamo.

Majid Khan was detained while he was staying with a brother in Pakistan in March 2003, according to his family and court filings by his attorneys. They said men who were not in uniform burst into the brother's apartment in Karachi late one night and put hoods over the faces of those inside: Majid, his brother Mohammad and his brother's wife. The couple's one-month-old son was also taken into custody.

Although the others were released without charges over the course of three months, Majid Khan's whereabouts were not officially disclosed until September, when President Bush named him as one of the 14 high-value detainees.

Mahmood Khan said his brother, a 1999 graduate of Owings Mills High School, dreamed of being a deejay or a rap musician, even for a time a U.S. Marine, but not a terrorist.

Khan was most recognizable as that young man in the earliest of the notes. He thanked his family for the letters they had sent, bragged that he could do 100 push-ups in 80 seconds, and asked for news of deaths and marriages. "And I don't need to tell you how much I love and miss you guys," he wrote.

Khan was more serious in the second letter. He wrote that he had grown a beard and had studied Islam deeply since his capture, that he now wrote poetry and could read the Koran without translation.

He asked his father for forgiveness and wrote that he had sinned, a reference, according to Mahmood Khan, not to criminal activity but to the pursuit of material indulgences.

"Things never stay the same, and life goes on, so please don't worry about me," he wrote. "Remember it's my sins who brought me here. When my sins are forgiven then I'll get freedom, so it's between me and Allah."

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.