XXXXX DRUDGE REPORT XXXXX THU MARCH 15 2000 20:58:01 ET XXXXX

REPORT: CENSUS BUREAU LINKED TO WWII INTERNMENT OF JAPANESE-AMERICANS

The NEW YORK TIMES is reporting in Friday editions that "[t]wo scholars say in a new research paper that despite earlier denials, the Census Bureau was deeply involved in the roundup and internment of Japanese-Americans at the onset of U.S. entry into World War II."

According to TIMES' scribe Steven Holmes, the Census Buerau helped identify "concentrations of people of Japanese ancestry in geographic units as small as city blocks."

The bureau is said to have given vital statistics -- including age, sex, citizenship and country of birth -- on only Japanese-Americans to the War Department (now known as the Defense Department).

The research paper cited is entitled "After Pearl Harbor: The Proper Role of Population Data Systems in Time of War" and was written by Margo Anderson, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin (Milwaukee) and William Seltzer, a statistician and demographer at Fordham University.

It will be released next week in Los Angeles at the annual Population Association of America meeting.

Japanese-Americans have long suspected that the Census Bureau played a prominent role in the relocation of 120,000 residents of Japanese ancestry to detention camps.

Former California congressman Norman Mineta, who spent time in a Wyoming detention center tells the paper:

"We've always suspected this. After all, they are the keeper of this kind of information."

Writes Holmes:

"The Census Bureau often boasted that its conduct in the relocation of Japanese-Americans had been its finest hour because it resisted pressure to provide explicit data to the War and Justice Departments. But Census Bureau officials do not dispute the findings of the paper."

Developing...

Click on

http://drudgereport.com

for updates of this story

http://drudgereport.com/matt.htm