SPLASHED ON THE front page of The Independent yesterday, was the figure 24,865. “Revealed: Iraq’s Civilian Death Toll”, read the headline.

It was not alone. The BBC’s bulletins ran with the same figure, as did the Daily Mirror and The Guardian — derived, said the latter, from “a detailed study of the human cost of the conflict”.

There is only one problem with the figure — not that you would know it from the credulous reporting. It is an entirely arbitrary figure published by political agitators.

The figure was released yesterday by two organisations, Iraq Body Count and the Oxford Research Group. According to the BBC, the former “is one of the most widely-quoted sources of information on the civilian death toll in Iraq”. Indeed it is — because the BBC itself reports its propaganda as fact.

One of the leading lights of the IBC is Marc Herold, a professor of economics and women’s studies at the University of New Hampshire. Professor Herold has attempted this trick before, when he “revealed” in December 2001 that there were then 3,800 civilian casualties in Afghanistan. The now-accepted figure at the time was two thirds less — about 1,200.

The reason his figures were so wrong then, and are almost certainly wrong now, is that the IBC’s methodology is designed to come to as large a total as possible. The organisation simply adds up all reports of casualties, no matter what the source or how scant the evidence. Hardly surprising, since the IBC’s associates are a veritable who’s who of anti-war activism.

The co-founder of IBC, John Sloboda, is also the director of the Oxford Research Group, an organisation “which seeks to develop effective methods whereby people can bring about positive change on issues of national and international security by non-violent means”. Translated, ORG is a lobbying group with a political agenda.

Professor Sloboda describes himself as having “worked with the Committee for Peace in the Balkans”. What that admirable title obscures is that the committee was, as he himself has put it, “essentially a lobbying and campaigning group against the Kosovo war”. Having opposed the liberation of Kosovo, he turned to Iraq.

The civilian costs of the war have been greater than its advocates expected. It does not help in getting to the truth, however, when parts of the media report partisan lobbying as fact.