Sen. McCain: Why do you settle for headlines instead of results?

The popular image of Sen. McCain is the conservative maverick. Plain-spoken, direct, he's the guy willing to break with his president if his principles led him elsewhere.
I was one of the many impressed by his championing the 2005 McCain amendment barring prisoner abuse. He went up against the President, and won the day.

Except he didn't, he got the photo op - and very little else:

"The McCain vote, of course, garnered front-page coverage around the country and on the networks. "President Backs McCain on Abuse," declared The New York Times.

What was mostly missed, however, were two key facts. First, the amendment, worthy as it was, wasn’t as strong as advertised. It contained no enforcement clause: soldiers or CIA agents couldn’t abuse prisoners, the bill stated, but it didn’t provide for any penalties if they did. The amendment, in other words, was mostly a statement of principle, without teeth.

What’s more, McCain’s amendment was undercut by another little-noticed amendment that was passed as part of the same defense appropriations bill. Sponsored by Senators Lindsey Graham, Carl Levin, and John Kyl, the amendment — which was combined with McCain’s measure to become the Detainee Treatment Act (DTA) — states that testimony gained through "coercion" can be used in military tribunals. Unlike the McCain amendment, which merely reaffirms existing laws, the Graham-Levin-Kyl measure muddies what had been clear waters. The amendment’s portion of the DTA also severely restricts detainees’ access to U.S. courts and strips them of the right to habeas corpus. It limits detainee cases to a single hearing in front of an appeals court, at which detainees have no clear right to present the facts of their case."
-Eric Umansky, CJR

Now Sen. McCain's back in the papers - having once again locked horns with the White House. The papers sign his praises, and rhapsodize about how he's standing on principle again.
And now, once more - we have to ask: what did you accomplish, Senator?

"...Mr. Bush, as he made clear yesterday, intends to continue using the CIA to secretly detain and abuse certain terrorist suspects. He will do so by issuing his own interpretation of the Geneva Conventions in an executive order and by relying on questionable Justice Department opinions that authorize such practices as exposing prisoners to hypothermia and prolonged sleep deprivation. Under the compromise agreed to yesterday, Congress would recognize his authority to take these steps and prevent prisoners from appealing them to U.S. courts. The bill would also immunize CIA personnel from prosecution for all but the most serious abuses and protect those who in the past violated U.S. law against war crimes."
-Washington Post Op Ed

"On other issues, the three rebel senators achieved only modest improvements on the White House’s original positions. They wanted to bar evidence obtained through coercion. Now, they have agreed to allow it if a judge finds it reliable (which coerced evidence hardly can be) and relevant to guilt or innocence. The way coercion is measured in the bill, even those protections would not apply to the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay.

The deal does next to nothing to stop the president from reinterpreting the Geneva Conventions. While the White House agreed to a list of "grave breaches" of the conventions that could be prosecuted as war crimes, it stipulated that the president could decide on his own what actions might be a lesser breach of the Geneva Conventions and what interrogation techniques he considered permissible. It’s not clear how much the public will ultimately learn about those decisions. They will be contained in an executive order that is supposed to be made public, but Mr. Hadley reiterated that specific interrogation techniques will remain secret.

Even before the compromises began to emerge, the overall bill prepared by the three senators had fatal flaws. It allows the president to declare any foreigner, anywhere, an "illegal enemy combatant" using a dangerously broad definition, and detain him without any trial. It not only fails to deal with the fact that many of the Guantánamo detainees are not terrorists and will never be charged, but it also chokes off any judicial review."
-NYT Op Ed

"Let's assume for the sake of argument that there ought to be a series of interrogation tactics that fall short of grave breaches but that ought still not to be permissible. That sounds right, indeed. But, the problem [with this deal] is [its] complete deferral to the President on this determination. There were other ways it could have been done, including legislative oversight, judicial determination (i.e. like a FISA court review), or some interrogation "body" that would assess the use of such tactics in specific circumstances. It didn't have to just go to the President; Congress could have equally allowed presidential tough tactics but still reserved some oversight over the use and consistency of those tactics (that fall short of a grave breach).
It is this concession to the President that is mind-boggling in almost all respects because the hold-outs could have given the President the less than grave tactics without giving him the sole authority to determine what they were."
--Juliette Kayyem

McCain has run into the Administration's buzz saw more than a few times, and he keeps coming away with little more than headlines.

So the question is, is that all he wants?