by Daniel Pipes
On March 20, 2002, officers from the FBI, customs, immigration, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), raided nineteen offices and residences in Virginia and Georgia in the largest action against suspected terrorism-financing in American history. One of the targets of “Operation Green Quest” was the Washington, D.C.-area residence of Iqbal Unus, a nuclear physicist, along with his wife Aysha Nudrat and their 18-year-old daughter Hanaa.
The Unus family responded to the raid by filing an implausible but important lawsuit two years later in the U.S. district court for Eastern Virginia. The three plaintiffs claimed there had been no probable cause to search their house, they further alleged a “conspiracy to violate [their] Constitutional rights,” and they sought punitive damages from several individuals associated with the raid:
