TRIPOLI, Libya — Even the Qaddafi government escort could not contain his disbelief at the sloppiness of the fraud: bloodstains his colleagues had left on bedsheets in a damaged hospital room for more than a week as evidence of civilian casualties from Western airstrikes.

“This is not even human blood!” the escort erupted to group of journalists, making a gesture with his hands like squeezing a tube. “I told them, ‘Nobody is going to believe this!’ ” he explained, as Elizabeth Palmer, a correspondent for CBS News, later recalled. His name was withheld for his protection.

For the more than 100 international journalists cloistered here at the invitation of the Qaddafi government, its management — or, rather, staging — of public relations provided a singular inside view of how this autocracy functions in a crisis.

As the incident of the faked blood shows, the Qaddafi government’s most honest trait might be its lack of pretense to credibility or legitimacy. It lies, but it does not try to be convincing or even consistent.