A year to the day after the Madrid commuter train terror bombings, the ongoing Spanish police probe has found that some sort of big-ticket atrocity was in the works as far back as the summer of 2001, about the same time September 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta was meeting with his Al Qaeda bagman in the eastern Spanish city of Tarragona. Spain’s involvement in Iraq, then, had nothing to do with the March 11 attack. But don’t expect this news to do much to avert another year of hysteria, denial, fearfulness, and finger-pointing.

Prime Minister Zapatero called an “International Summit on Terrorism and Democracy” culminating yesterday, to which he invited some 50 present and former heads of state and government to Madrid along with religious leaders and some 200 “experts.” Why 200 viewpoints were supposed to be helpful or even relevant to the occasion is not clear.

You’d think the 192 people who were massacred on their way to work that Thursday morning one year ago today would have wanted their deaths to count for more than candle-lighting ceremonies and a call for papers. True, there is a computer terminal set up at Atocha station, scene of the deadliest blasts, where people can key in messages of grief, sympathy, or indignation. But there has been no tectonic shift in opinion on the scale of September 11 in America, no consensus to mortar the country’s political fracture lines, not even a general awareness that Spain has a problem that did not go away when seven of the Islamic terrorists who planted the train bombs obligingly blew themselves to bits to escape arrest a few weeks later.

Instead, Spain remains a country unable to disentangle itself from the contradictions and political and institutional polarization the attacks created, which brought down the second term, center-right Popular Party in elections held on schedule just four days after the bombing, replacing them with the Socialist opposition.

That the Spanish people were stampeded into flailing out in blind rage at the government that failed to protect them is pretty much taken for granted not only in Washington and by legions of Zapatero-averse pundits closer to home, but even in those European capitals where the man the Wall Street Journal calls the “accidental prime minister” had expected to find ideological allies. Think of what it must mean for Mr. Zapatero’s perception of his own legitimacy, knowing he is seen by many as having benefited, however inadvertently, from an act of terror that influenced or altered the political process; that he is the European leader who owes his majority and mandate to 192 corpses.

It will be interesting to see how much longer he can keep their ghosts at bay by claiming that it wasn’t so much that he won the elections but that the Popular Party lost (and deserved to lose) them because the Spanish people were determined even before the attacks occurred to punish the former prime minister, Jose Maria Aznar, for having aligned with President Bush and Prime Minister Blair over Iraq. That view is supported by the fact that the number of votes Mr. Aznar’s party received was not much changed from the 2000 general elections. What happened was that 2.5 million Spaniards did not vote that year (abstainers and first-timers), while half a million more changed allegiance and supported the Socialists, short-circuiting the opinion polls that right up to the end had given the Popular Party a more than comfortable lead.

As reversals of fortune go, this one was orchestrated with masterstrokes of malice. No sooner had the evidence begun coming in contradicting everybody’s initial assumption that the killings were the work of Basque ETA terrorists than Spain’s symbiotic media empire, credited with calling the shots for the Socialists’ electoral strategy, got to work accusing the administration of deliberately lying about ETA. Indeed, to this day Mr. Zapatero maintains it was Mr. Aznar’s decision to send a token Spanish contingent to help stabilize southern Iraq that provoked the jihad boys to retaliate.

The blame-the-government blitz worked. Demonstrations were called illegally on what was supposed to be a politics-free “day of reflection,” while a persistent disinformation campaign spread via radio jockeys, SMS text messages, and party-sponsored Web sites brought the desired results: crowds chanting “Aznar murderer” for the cameras outside the polling station where the outgoing prime minister cast his ballot.

For his part, Mr. Aznar believes the attacks were deliberately timed and aimed at “inverting the outcome” of the elections his designated successor Mariano Rajoy had all but sewn up. He may be right. Until it is known who coordinated the parallel schemes for acquiring the money, recruits, dynamite, and technical expertise required for the attacks, it is hard to say one way or another whether the terrorists deliberately intended to finesse a change of government or were “merely” out to slaughter as many innocent people as they possibly could.

So far, however, the search for the man who gave the orders has turned up one middle-sized fish who was arrested in Italy on the strength of an intercepted call in which he boasted about his mastermind role, but his story has sprung leaks since he was extradited. A second suspect nabbed just a few weeks ago in the Canary Islands has been fingered by some of the 131 Islamic radicals taken into custody last year and still held under anti-terrorist legislation, including 40 linked to a plot to blow up the Madrid courthouse complex where the Audiencia Nacional, the high court with jurisdiction over terror crimes, sits in session. And in early February, Belgian police detained the self-styled “military spokesman for Al Qaeda in Europe” who appeared on a videotape claiming credit for Osama’s boys shortly after the atrocity.

If not Iraq, what made the terrorists decide to strike at Spain? It appears to have been for the same reasons that Islamic radicals have been using the country as a safe haven since as long ago as 1994: Because Spain is a pushover. It has a Muslim population of over half a million, plenty of storefront mosques for the one stop recruitment of wannabe martyrs – single, unemployed males in the country illegally – and a source of ready financing in the Moroccan-controlled hash trade. To these add security forces that have their hands full with Basque terrorists, inept judges who make it easy to get off on appeal, and pitifully lax airport security. Not that Spain’s intelligence services were unaware of what was going on. They concluded, however, that the country was unlikely to be targeted by the same groups that found it a useful and relatively hassle-free sanctuary and staging area.

So a year after the horror, has so little really changed? Actually, there is one item. In Spain you’re not allowed to talk about “Islamic terrorism” any more. Too judgmental and unfair to the billion nonhomicidal adherents of that religion, several million of whom live just 13 miles away on the other side of the Strait of Gibraltar. The buzzword from now on is going to be “international terrorism.” Just so you get it right.

Mr. Latona is a reporter based in Madrid.