Blood’s team could hear sporadic gunshots at night across the city. “Wanton acts of violence by military are continuing in Dacca,” he cabled. He repo… - Archer Blood

We were also harboring, all of us were harboring, Bengalis, mostly Hindu Bengalis, who were trying to flee mostly by taking refuge with our own servants. Our servants would give them refuge. All of us were doing this. I had a message from Washington saying that they had heard we were doing this and to knock it off. I told them we were doing it and would continue to do it. We could not turn these people away. They were not political refugees. They were just poor, very low-class people, mostly Hindus, who were very much afraid that they would be killed solely because they were Hindu.

Thus Blood sent a furious cable with a jolting subject line: “Selective Genocide.” He was not a lawyer, but the use of the word “genocide” was meant to shock, to slice through the anodyne bureaucratic niceties of State Department cables. Blood held nothing back: “Here in Dacca we are mute and horrified witnesses to a reign of terror by the Pak military.” (Within the U.S. government, Blood had hardly been mute, but he could not protest to Pakistani officials.) He warned of evidence that the military authorities were “systematically eliminating” Awami League supporters “by seeking them out in their homes and shooting them down.” He recounted the killing of politicians, professors, and students. The streets were flooded with Hindus and others trying desperately to get out of Dacca. This assault, he wrote, could not be justified by military necessity: “There is no r[e]p[ea]t no resistance being offered in Dacca to military.”

Blood was left alone, howling into the wind. “The silence from Washington was deafening,” he remembered later, “suggesting to us that less credence was being given to our reporting than to the Pakistani claims that little more was involved than a police action to round up some ‘miscreants’ led astray by India.” Blood would always have preferred a united Pakistan, but these atrocities had doomed that. He cabled with disgust, “A reign of terror began and thousands were slaughtered, innocent along with allegedly guilty. And all in the name of preserving the unity of the country.”