Mansoor Adayfi, Director of Outreach
Mansoor Adayfi is an award-winning author and the Guantanamo Project coordinator for CAGE. He was wrongfully detained in Guantanamo for over 14 years. In 2016, he was transferred to Serbia, where he is striving to make a new life for himself and to transcend the label of "suspected terrorist." His book, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo, earned the Arab American National Museum's Evelyn Shakir Non-Fiction Award and the Muslim Bookstagram Best Adult Book Award. His writing has been featured in numerous publications including The Guardian, Al Jazeera, and The New York Times Modern Love column, and he received the Richard J. Margolis Award for nonfiction writers of social-justice journalism. He is a dedicated advocate for the rights of the men still detained in Guantanamo, and he has established and maintains contact with many Guantanamo survivors to provide support and solidarity for them as they seek to rebuild their lives.
Dr. Maha Hilal, Steering Committee
Dr. Maha Hilal is a Muslim Arab American and an expert on institutionalized Islamophobia, the War on Terror, and counternarrative work. Dr. Hilal is the author of the book Innocent Until Proven Muslim: Islamophobia, the War on Terror, and the Muslim Experience Since 9/11. Her writings have appeared in Vox, Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye, Newsweek, Business Insider, and Truthout, among others. Dr. Hilal is the founding Executive Director of Muslim Counterpublics Lab, an organization that works to disrupt and subvert dehumanizing narratives that are designed and deployed to justify state violence against Muslims. Additionally, Dr. Hilal is an organizer with Witness Against Torture, an organization that organizes and advocates for the closure of Guantanamo Bay prison and an end to torture. Dr. Hilal earned her doctorate in May 2014 from the Department of Justice, Law and Society at American University in Washington, D.C. She received her Master's Degree in Counseling and her Bachelor's Degree in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Beth D. Jacob, Steering Committee
Beth is the founder, president and managing attorney of Healing and Recovery after Trauma, which supports men who are or were imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay, as well as other torture survivors. She has represented Guantánamo prisoners since 2005, starting while she was in private practice at corporate law firms in New York City. Her private practice focused on complex litigation, including representing generic pharmaceutical companies in patent litigation and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey in cases arising from the September 11, 2001, attacks. Before founding HeaRT, Beth was a senior supervising attorney at the Southern Poverty Law Center. Beth is a graduate of Radcliffe College (Harvard University) and Yale Law School.
Dan Norland, Steering Committee
Dan Norland is a high school history teacher at La Jolla Country Day School in San Diego, California. He co-edited Witnesses of the Unseen: Seven Years in Guantanamo, the joint memoir of Guantanamo survivors Lakhdar Boumediene and Mustafa Ait Idir.
Helen Schietinger, Steering Committee
Helen Schietinger, retired RN, is an organizer for Witness Against Torture, a grassroots campaign that since 2005 has centered on all the Muslim men tortured and detained indefinitely by the US in Guantanamo Prison. She has also volunteered with the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition. Her writing includes letters challenging media coverage of and articles challenging government participation in torture.
Nancy Talanian, Steering Committee
Nancy Talanian has served as the director of No More Guantanamos since 2009. From 2002 to 2008, she served as founding executive director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee (BORDC), a national grassroots initiative to uphold the protections of the Bill of Rights, the US Constitution, and international treaties threatened by new, post-9/11 laws and policies such as the USA PATRIOT Act, torture, and detention without charge at the prison at Guantanamo Bay and at 'black sites'. BORDC is now called Defending Rights & Dissent.