Anant Raut

Anant Raut is an American lawyer. He was formerly an associate at Weil, Gotshal & Manges. He was also formerly Counsel to the Committee on the Judiciary of the U.S. House of Representatives. He is currently an attorney at Pepper Hamilton LLP in Washington, DC.
Anant Raut is a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School. After working for two years litigating antitrust cases at the Federal Trade Commission, he joined Weil, Gotshal & Manges. He has provided habeas representation to 5 Saudi Arabian detainees held at Guantanamo Bay detention camp, including two of the 16 Saudis released from Guantanamo in early September 2007: Abdullah Al Anazi, and Abdul Aziz Sad Al Owshan. Another one of his clients, Adel al Nusairi, was featured in an April 22, 2008 Washington Post story as one of a number of detainees who were allegedly drugged with unknown substances prior to being interrogated. As stated in the article, during one such interrogation in which a groggy Mr. al Nusairi was forcibly kept awake in an ice-cold room, eventually signing a false confession professing involvement in al Qaeda. The article further stated that a 2003 Department of Justice memo by John C. Yoo explicitly condoned the use of drugs on detainees.
Mr. Raut and fellow habeas attorney Candace Gorman were two of the first people to dispute the administration's charge that approximately 30 former Guantanamo detainees had returned to the battlefield, a claim later substantiated by researchers at Seton Hall Law School.
In response to statements by the Department of Defense that it only intended to charge between 60 and 80 of the prisoners being held in Guantanamo Bay, Mr. Raut prepared a series of slides in June 2007 showing the high cost of continuing to hold the remaining 300.
In late 2007, Mr. Raut joined the Al Odah v. United States trial team, one of the cases decided as part of the Supreme Court's decision in Boumediene v. Bush, decided on June 12, 2008.
Mr. Raut is a recipient of the 2007 National Legal Aid & Defender Association Beacon of Justice Award and the 2007 Southern Center for Human Rights Frederick Douglass Human Rights Award.

• (with Jill M. Friedman) The Saudi Repatriates Report, March 19, 2007.
• 'Why I defend “terrorists”', salon.com, January 17, 2007
• (w J. Benjamin Schrader) "Dereliction of Duty: When Members of Congress Vote for Legislation They Believe to Be Unconstitutional," New York City Law Review (Fall 2007)
• GTMO Documents, "What About the Other 300+?"