It's easy to dismiss something like this as mob violence: Once one person discovers he can commit a crime with impunity, others follow, upping the ante until suddenly all sense and control is gone. When I arrived in Ramallah during an Israeli rocket attack on the site of the lynching, I hid as an unrepentant crowd marched past me and shouted in defiant response. I wondered at what point conscience would interrupt their chanting: When does a person realize he has done something he knows innately to be wrong? I watched my shaken Palestinian colleagues sink their heads into their hands as they tried to fathom how things turned so ugly that they, too, were beaten and their cameras snatched away. On a dime, an angry scene turned vicious. Everyone--and no one--was to blame for what transpired.

Some people have crowed at the images from Surt, calling it justice. They say that the tyrant got the ending he deserved, that he died as he had ruled, with brutal force.

Yet we know that's not true. We've watched ousted Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak on trial from his hospital bed--an image that has gripped not only Egyptians but also people around the world (including fellow dictators). The trial of Saddam Hussein was a farce from start to jolting end, yet these two exercises in "due process" allowed their victims to face their former tormentors. Qaddafi will never be held to account. He'll never have to obey a court's jurisdiction, he'll never see the inside of a cell, and he'll never witness how Libya can triumph without him.

Instead he was killed by men with their guns, in a pack scene that bordered on barbarity. By depriving Qaddafi and his many victims of justice, those fighters in Surt raised fears that those who were fighting to depose him might be as ruthless as the person they were determined to replace.

It speaks volumes about the intentions of a fledgling leadership when it promises to try a hated ruler with as much fairness and dignity as the people can stomach. And on this point, Libya's Transitional National Council failed. Qaddafi's killing raises uncomfortable questions about how much control the council has over its forces. Initial claims by the council that Qaddafi was killed in an airstrike on his convoy were quickly changed once those cell-phone videos made it onto the Internet and television. Then, later speculation by one official that a loyalist could have killed Qaddafi were further undone when footage of the presumed killer being embraced and congratulated made it onto the Internet.

After an autopsy, Qaddafi's still-bloodied corpse was laid beside that of his son Mutassim in a refrigerator in Misrata for several days for everyone to see. It was a blatant violation of Islamic law that requires washing of the corpse and burial before sunset--this at the same time that the council announced it would use Islam's sharia as the foundation for its new laws.