From the article:
"But the strategy won't work. The president's fear-mongering merely created a strange discordance, since most Americans don't consider the war on terror the most important issue facing the country."
The reason the American people are not so concerned about terrorist attacks is precisely because the Bush administration and so many government workers at every level have been doing such a great job in prosecuting the war on terror.
Those controversial detentions in Gitmo and in the US probably saved a lot of Anerican lives by disrupting Islamofascist operations. Sure, we cannot prosecute many of those detained in the US, because it is hard to know which likely sleeper is a real sleeper until they blow themselves up and take out a thousand Americans with them.
The terrorists have not found it so easy to carry out attacks on US soil, so they hit soft targets in the Moslem world. They descend on Iraq, where they can try to kill armed US soldiers who actually have a chance to defend themselves and fight back. This is not good, but it is much better than terrorist attacks on US soil.