If you want to buy, I am selling
Guantanamo Diary“If you want to buy, I am selling” is Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s bitterly transactional description of offering interrogators a story they want to hear. Its force lies in the reversal it contains: a supposed breakthrough is celebrated as valuable information, then exposed as a fabrication offered under pressure to satisfy the people questioning him.
The phrase as an offer
In one exchange, Slahi hands over a written statement. The recipient reads it happily and declares, “This statement makes perfect sense.” Slahi answers, “If you’re ready to buy, I am selling,” while the interrogator can hardly remain seated and wants to leave immediately. Slahi frames the episode with irony: after nearly four years of uninterrupted interrogation by agencies from more than six countries, this was treated as a breakthrough. One person on the team, however, doubted the story’s truthfulness.
Approval in place of truth
A later exchange makes the phrase’s meaning explicit. Asked whether the story is true, Slahi says that the people he had claimed involvement with were bad and should be imprisoned, and that he did not care about himself so long as the interrogators were pleased. He then repeats the offer: “if you want to buy, I am selling.” When pressed about verification by other agencies, he says, “If you want the truth, this story didn’t happen.” The movement from apparent agreement to direct retraction turns the phrase into a compact account of how a claim can be shaped to meet an interrogator’s expectations without being true.
The account and its limits
The phrase appears within a manuscript shaped by censorship and editorial intervention. The book’s annotations describe efforts to understand redactions through surrounding context and public records, while explicitly declining to reconstruct the missing text or claim access to classified material. That distinction matters here: the scene presents Slahi’s own account of a false story and the interrogators’ reaction, but the phrase does not by itself establish the contents of the censored passages around it. Its significance rests on the contrast the narrative does show: the statement is welcomed as a success, yet Slahi identifies it as untrue.
