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Press TV has interviewed Mike Gravel, former US Senator, San Francisco about the issue of the US still running secret prisons in Afghanistan even after handing over prison responsibility earlier this year to the Karzai government.

- How legal is it what Washington is doing now, against these prisoners?

- In Bagram, how legal? I don't think it has any legality at all, it would come under a military jurisdiction in a foreign war zone and so I don't think there would be much ability to get any confirmation at least from the American government.

But possibly, the Karzai government, since they're supposed to be the recipients of the prison back in April; may be an inquiry should be addressed to them; they would either confirm or deny this information about Americans continuing to hold prisoners and torture them.

- What can the Afghan government do to bring the prison under its full control in the real sense of the term because we're speaking about national sovereignty here?

- Well, keep in mind it was turned over to them in April. I don’t know... there may well be a communication complaining from the Afghan government that they haven't got full sovereignty over the prisons. But at least the press releases that were released in April said the US had turned over the prison to the Afghan government. What more can we say at this point.

Certainly if the source that you have is credible then obviously it should on occasion be addressing inquiry and I would address that inquiry to the Afghan government

- When do you think we'll see a full withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan?

- They should never have been put in there in the first place. There should have never been a surge and they should have gotten out last year. But all we can do is, the schedule that's being advanced is into next year.

But that may accelerate because we're not training Afghan forces due to the fact that many of them have killed -individual police forces have killed their American trainers. So I think we're just hunkered down.

I don’t think they're doing anything significant. We might as well get them out of there as soon as possible and I think to some degree that will be accelerated at the beginning of next year.