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How did you become interested in denial and its consequences? I was in elementary school during Desert Storm, in high school during Operation Desert Fox, and in college at the start of the war in Iraq. Like most Americans, my understanding of these conflicts was refracted through politics and the media. So much was left unsaid. For instance, during the second Iraq war, the Department of Defense neither counted nor estimated the number of Iraqi casualties. And euphemisms, such as “collateral damage,” minimized the human costs of these conflicts. In 2004, things changed. The release of photographs of U.S. torture at Abu Ghraib forced politicians and the media to reckon with violence. The photographs were “undeniable” in a sense. Politicians now had to at least admit that detainees had been mistreated in Iraq. So, I began studying the political response to Abu Ghraib and found a range of forms of denial in use. This work turned into a broader study of the denial of torture during