Report: Visas of U.S.-Bound Foreigners Not Checked Before Flight

According to standard procedure prior to the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day, officials did not check the visa status of foreign airline passengers until after their flights had already left the ground for the U.S., Newsweek reports.

The report sources U.S. officials who offer little reasoning as to why the visa verification process routinely occurred after, rather than before, U.S.-bound planes had departed.

State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley told Newsweek the process is now "being reviewed.”

The information means that the visa status of Detroit bomb suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was not checked until his flight was already in the air.

Prior reports have claimed that security officials "learned" of Abdulmutallab’s link to extremists while he was en route to the U.S. from Amsterdam.

But an administration official later downplayed reports that U.S. customs officials were preparing to scrutinize him once he landed, saying "no new information" emerged when the plane was in the air.

In a hearing before the Senate Homeland Security Committee Wednesday on the Christmas Day plot, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair said he had wrongly caved to external "pressure" to trim the no-fly list and Abdulmutallab should have been questioned by the recently created High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group.

As for the way Abdulmutallab was handled after his arrest, Blair said the HIG should have "automatically" been deployed to interrogate the suspect, even though it was originally designed to deal with terror suspects captured overseas.

"That unit was created exactly for this purpose," Blair said. "We did not invoke the HIG in this case. We should have."

Instead, Abdulmutallab was interviewed by federal law enforcement investigators when Northwest Flight 253 landed in Detroit.

Afterward, Blair released a statement defending the way the FBI conducted its interrogations, after it was noted that the HIG has not yet had its charter finalized.

"My remarks today before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs have been misconstrued. The FBI interrogated Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab when they took him into custody. They received important intelligence at that time, drawing on the FBI's expertise in interrogation that will be available in the HIG once it is fully operational," he said.

So far, nobody has been disciplined in the wake of the terror attempt. Though Obama appeared to wave off calls for resignations when he unveiled the results of a preliminary review earlier this month, Sen. Joe Lieberman said Wednesday that anyone who "did not perform up to the requirement of their jobs" should be "disciplined or removed."

A White House report this month outlined a series of missteps in the failed Christmas Day plot, including name misspellings, ignored warnings and oversights. But for a failed detonator and the swift action of passengers, the attack might have killed all 289 people aboard.