ALBRIGHT LIED — PEOPLE DIED:

THE HAGUE — The prosecution in Slobodan Milosevic’s war crimes trial moved yesterday to rest its case two days early as the chief prosecutor conceded her team had not produced “the smoking gun” to convict the former Yugoslav president of genocide, the most serious charge against him.

No doubt we’ll see handwringing, doubts about intelligence reliability, and charges that the Clinton Administration “sexed up” intelligence and misrepresented

Milosevic as a genocidal dictator in order to build support for unilateral action that even Wesley Clark called technically illegal — but justified on the basis of an “imminent threat” of genocide, one that is now, of course, completely undermined by the absence of a “smoking gun.” Massive criticism of the Clinton Administration’s warmaking, which landed us in a “Balkan quagmire” from which we have yet to extricate ourselves, is sure to ensue.

Yeah, right, that’s going to happen.

UPDATE: Some related comments here.