committee has joined that posse searching for the "real reason" that Nidal Malik Hassan went berserk and allegedly killed 13 people at Fort Hood, Tex.

Expect them to come up with something. They always do.

In fact, Sen. Joe Lieberman's Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs is already onto something. Turns out that Hassan used to pray at the Dar al Hijrah Islamic Center, in Falls Church, Va.

The center, dubbed by the New York Daily News as "The Mosque of Evil," is the place where two of the 9/11 hijackers prayed. One of them, Hani Hanjour, may have been a regular at the mosque at the same time as Hassan and members of Hassan's family.

Anwar al Awlaki, the radical former imam at the center, made a blog post yesterday praising Hassan as "a man of conscience who could not bear living the contradiction that many Muslims brush aside."

He bore it long enough for the U.S. Army to pay for his medical training. He'd still be bearing it, I suspect, if he hadn't gotten orders to report to the war zone in Afghanistan. So much for "conscience."

If U.S. soldiers were his enemy, he had been giving aid and comfort to the enemy for years. So what made him suddenly see the light from the East?

The posse is still pursuing the answers to that question.

"There are very, very strong warning signs," Sen. Lieberman said Sunday, "that Dr. Hassan had become an Islamist extremist and, therefore, that this was a terrorist act."

There is little evidence that Hassan and the two 9/11 terrorists had been seen together at the Falls Church mosque or that they ever had spoken with each other or had ever conspired to do anything except pray facing the East.

It happens to be the biggest Islamic center on the East Coast. Thousands of worshippers pray there. Most of them understand that they can't get to heaven by shooting unarmed people or by setting off a bomb in a marketplace where most shoppers are also Muslim.

That trail will go cold. The committee will find only the most tenuous connections between Hassan and any terrorist affiliations just as it has found no terrorist links on his computers.

But it will issue a detailed report. Its findings will be preserved in the annotated archives of mass murder and draw dust until the next spring-loaded nut job spins out of control and starts mowing down innocent bystanders.

We can always come up with something from the catalog of homicidal motivations to rationalize the irrational. Was it a family feud or a money dispute?

But there is no "real reason" for a psychopath to make himself the arbiter of life and death.

I was in Killeen, Texas, in October 1991, a few hours after George Hennard drove his truck through the plate-glass window at the Luby's Cafeteria, then got out and methodically started shooting people.

He reloaded calmly and fired again and again until 14 women and eight men were dead and 18 others were wounded. He was still firing when police arrived. He apparently killed himself before police could.

This happened on Route 190, a few miles from the Fort Hood main gate. It all came back to me as I processed this latest insane incident.

Aside from the magnitude of this carnage, what I remember most is a police spokesman named Mike DeHart who was briefing reporters when I pulled up.

"There is nothing in the way of motives yet," he told us.

By the next day, they were telling us that Hennard, who was 35, had been upset by his parents' divorce. That's not much to offer as a cause of 22 deaths. There won't be much to offer this time either.

In reality, the carnage is as random and remorseless as a whirlwind that skips over an open field then slams into a schoolyard at recess.

The posse will keep searching for "real reasons." But nothing it turns up would have saved a single life at Virginia Tech in 2007, in Luby's Cafeteria in 1991 or in Fort Hood last week.

Or wherever the next storm touches down.

Send e-mail to smithel@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2512. For recent columns: http://go.philly.com/smith