Woman On Diverted Plane Is America-Hating “Journalist”
August 17th, 2006
From Boston’s CBS station, CBS4Boston.com:
This undated photo released by a family member shows Catherine C. Mayo of Braintree, Vt., who was scheduled to appear in federal court Thursday afternoon, Aug. 17, 2006, in Boston. Mayo was to be charged with interfering with a flight crew after disrupting United 923 bound from London to Washington, D.C. on Wednesday.
Woman In Logan Airport Incident Identified
Aug 17, 2006 9:28 am US/Eastern
(CBS4) BOSTON Criminal charges could be filed Thursday against a Vermont woman who caused a disturbance aboard a London-to-Virginia jet that was diverted to Logan Airport.
59-year-old Catherine Mayo is being held by federal authorities in Boston.
Investigators say she was a claustrophobic passenger who became upset and interfered with the flight crew on United Airlines flight 923 Wednesday morning. The pilot declared an in-flight emergency and landed the plane at Logan. The Boeing 767 was escorted by two F-15 jets based out of Otis Air National Guard Base on Cape Cod.
Passengers say Mayo paced the aisles and peppered her incoherent mutterings with the word "Pakistan." They said two plainclothes men on board and flight attendants tackled the woman. She was handcuffed while the flight was diverted.
After a day filled with conflicting reports about what she was carrying, an FBI spokeswoman confirmed Mayo had a screwdriver, lighters and matches when she was subdued.
Mayo was taken into custody, questioned inside the airport, and held overnight in Boston.
All the passengers and luggage were removed from the plane. The passengers were interviewed at Logan and the luggage was spread out on the runway and searched by TSA canine teams.
Federal investigators said there was no indication of terrorism.
Several hours later, the flight departed for Dulles Airport outside Washington D.C. and landed there around 7 p.m.
The flight had taken off from Heathrow Airport in London, where there’s been tight security in place since last week’s arrests in a plot to blow up trans-Atlantic flights.
In other articles Catherine Mayo has been reported to be a journalist, as she was by the UK’s Guardian:
A British intelligence source told the Guardian the passenger was a journalist.
If so, perhaps this is our heroine writing for the Pakistan Daily Times:
Freedom after 9/11
Americans understand, deep down, that they have lost their freedom. They had it once, they remember what it was, but it is gone
by Catherine Mayo
22nd July 2003
The Daily Times (Pakistan)Plato was the first person to think in words about what it would be like for a human being to be self-governing. His thoughts tended to go around in circles, because he was a man ahead of his time and he didn’t have the words. His symbolism of the cave is good, because that is how he felt. He knew the possibility was there, in the dark, but he just couldn’t see it.
Self-government is a discipline that we all take for granted now. It means action after careful consideration of our moral principles. It is hard to imagine how the cave man made decisions, because he didn’t do anything unless he got the permission from someone else. It takes a long time for a human being to trust his own knowledge about the difference between good and bad. Confidence in our inner connection with God has to be taught to us as children, and we have to teach it to our children.
Americans now are feeling about the same way as their heroes, the troops in Baghdad. They are tired, confused and they see no end to their confusion. Ambushes happen every day, from any quarter, and they haven’t figured out who the enemy is. They are putting out so many small brushfires on a daily basis that they don’t have time to think things through and plan a strategy. Their leaders are no help, the president ran off to start a road map for peace between Israel and Palestine, and then did a comprehensive political tour of Africa. Now Bush is worried about Iran. North Korea, too, but mostly Iran. North Korea is building up a nuclear arsenal that it will sell to Iran for food, and then Iran will give the bombs to all of its terror groups so they can attack the US.
The decision-makers on the ground in Iraq are not faring any better. They are trying to decide who would be the best people to rule in Iraq in a council form of government, an idea they finally hit upon because they couldn’t figure out how to start a democracy.
Like their troops, Americans are plagued by questions about why they are in Iraq. No WMD, no Al Qaeda, no regime change. But they can’t admit this to themselves. Never in history has the US made such a bad mistake. Americans are wandering around in the dark, hoping that someone will provide an intelligent explanation soon.
But the moment has passed. They have gone back to the cave man way of thinking. They have forgotten that they know how to be self-governing.
I got a letter from a person in the US arguing that I was misinformed about a lot of things, and that I should remember what it is to be free. He didn’t define what he meant by ‘free’. I am free, I don’t have to remember what it was like, I know it now. I am free to see the difference between right and wrong, and to do the right thing.
I have been trying to compile a definition of ‘freedom’ or what it means to Americans at present. To them, freedom means doing something about 9/11 so it will never happen again.
But it has not happened again. We are coming up to the second anniversary, and the horror of that day has not been repeated.
So let me try again. To Americans, at this moment in history, freedom means knowing that they can do anything they want, and it will always turn out right in the end. Freedom means believing something is true with such conviction that it is required to come true.
No, now I am not making sense. Americans understand, deep down, that they have lost their freedom. They had it once, they remember what it was, but it is gone.
Plato’s ideas about the potential in every human being are written in a style that makes us smile when we read it. Plato had an interesting, off-beat sense of humour. Anyone who has hope, and confidence in himself, has a sense of humour. Even the Iraqis, looting the presidential palaces after the fall of Baghdad, had a sense of humour about themselves. They called themselves ‘Ali Babas’, and one would scold another to take back the carpet even while he was making off with the chandelier.But Americans do not have a sense of humour anymore. This is the most telling characteristic now, the biggest cultural difference between them and the rest of the world. They can’t laugh at a joke, they don’t even understand it.
Cathy Mayo is an American journalist based in Pakistan
And in another article by the same author, she says she is from Vermont — and much else besides:
The Patriotism Enforcers
An American in Pakistan: A New Kind of Arrogance
by Catherine Mayo
As a Vermonter used to 6 months of snow, two months of mud season, and one month when I can take off my long winter underwear, it is taking me awhile to realise that Pakistani heat is not a one-day event that will go away with a thunderstorm in the morning. The solution I have found is to drink one coke after another - with ice. I’m not sure what a doctor would say about this, but it works. So I am doing all right with the heat. I can’t blame it for the bad mood I woke up with this morning.
I started reading the paper, but then put it down after glancing at the headlines. It gives me a severe case of nerves when I know what the news is before I have read it. Once America decided that "might is right", everything else became a cliché, too. When dissent is not allowed, all truth becomes predictable. But that is not the reason for my bad mood, either. What really bothered me, as I drank my coffee and ate my eggs, was that I had to somehow write a column that told the truth in new ways. It is getting harder and harder. What if one morning I wake up and find that it can’t be done anymore?
Feeling sorry for myself, I put on a CD of really old music. Rolling Stones, ZZ Top, Genesis. When they woke up in the morning, they knew that they had a whole day yet to be invented. They could plan on moving to the moon, and make a list of what they would need to bring with them. They could make up a new kind of love, like the time that people did scientific experiments to show that two potted plants sitting next to each other on a windowsill could love one another if they listened to enough Mozart. Even the thought of such a possibility can make a person smile in the morning.
But if I invented a truth today, I know already that by the end of the day I would have to declare myself a failure. Someone would listen to me, and shake his head, and tell me that the truth doesn’t matter anymore. Feeling even more sorry for myself, I decided to go out to my favourite lake. I sat on a bench near the shore, under a trumpet vine just like the ones at home. Small birds almost like hummingbirds darted in and out of the orange blossoms. Every once in a while a fish jumped up through the surface of the lake. An old man, sitting on another bench, began to play a Pakistani kind of flute. He was very, very good, his music had so many surprises in it.
Americans are not surprised that there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. They are not surprised that Saddam Hussein cannot be found, and that Chemical Ali is missing instead of dead. They are not surprised that there is no Al Qaeda there. They are a little surprised that Iraq has so much desert, they thought that Baghdad made up most of the country. They are not surprised that Iraq’s only terrorist group has been recruited by US troops to serve as a police force. They are not surprised that Iraq’s nuclear facility has been looted, and Iraqi people are showing clear signs of radiation poisoning. What surprises them is that people are asking questions. It is all ancient history now, the stock market is up again, the news now is Martha Stewart again, and the Laci Peterson case, and the west nile virus. The rest of the world should be doing what they are doing: shrug your shoulders, man, what is done is done, it is time to move on. It goes right over the heads of Americans that when a crime has been committed, questions need to be asked.
Americans are true innocents when it comes to this. Since they did it, no crime has been committed, because America cannot do anything wrong. It is the innocence of an arrogance that even other empires in the world do not understand. When the Greek Empire ruled the world, or the British Empire, they understood that defeat at certain times and in certain places was inevitable. They knew that the power of a government did not insure its infallibility. Americans, on the other hand, make a false assumption based on the definition of democracy itself.
America relied on the free voice of its own people to tell the state when it was doing the wrong thing. Good prevails when every voice is heard with equal respect. There was no room in the American system for blind obedience. Each person in the country had the moral responsibility to speak his own truth, and to listen with equal seriousness to the truth of others. Judgments of right and wrong were made among the people themselves, through the humility of majority rule. When dissent is silenced, a person does not know the truth of the man standing next to him.
Cathy Mayo is an American journalist based in Pakistan
I guess we have even lost the freedom the freedom to yell "fire" in a crowded theater.
But someone should explain to Ms. Mayo’s the Platonic ideals of government, which were more reflected by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union than the United States.
Indeed, Ms. Mayo sounds like quite the uninformed America-hating Bush-bashing kook. What a surprise she’s a journalist.
(That’s a joke, in case you don’t understand — you stupid American.)
Update!
The photo release now posted at the top and the latest Associated Press article have confirmed our suspicions.
This is the Catherine Mayo who writes hate-America screeds for the Muslim Pakistani Daily Times.
How long will it be before our one party media tells us about this?
If ever?
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