Is white rice bleached before being processed? My dad is being especially paranoid of this. He claims to have read a paper years ago that said that the standard in rice processing was bleaching the rice to produce "whiter" rice.

I've been searching everywhere, and for only weird fringe sites, most of the main sites (Wikipedia, some other cooking websites) make no mention of bleach.

Is my father being paranoid about this? Or are his claims substantiated?
No. It is not general practice to add bleach to rice. The brown rice bran is removed through mechanical processes. As to whether he should continue to indulge this worry...I'd be more concerned about [insert common American male problem here] before ammonia in rice. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3138007/ This review has many free references in it.  Should you want further peer-review reading, I can provide it.