Washington ? With the government’s anti-terrorism legal strategy under increasing scrutiny, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft tried to assure lawyers Saturday that the Bush administration welcomed oversight and was using new powers to make “quiet steady progress” in the terrorism fight.

The government so far has successfully fended off legal challenges of its imprisonment of U.S. “enemy combatants,” secrecy about immigrants arrested after the Sept. 11 attacks and the detention of terrorism suspects in Cuba.

Ashcroft told a conservative lawyers group, the Federalist Society, that the government was “protecting the American people while honoring the Constitution and preserving the liberties we hold dear.”

But courts have yet to rule on constitutional challenges to an anti-terror law, the Patriot Act. Last week, the Supreme Court moved into the middle of the post-Sept. 11 debate, announcing that the nine justices would decide whether foreigners held at a military base in Cuba could contest their captivity in American courts.

Also this month, the Supreme Court asked the administration to explain the secrecy surrounding the detention of one of the immigrants arrested in Florida after the Sept. 11 attacks.

“There is no question the Bush administration wants more power in the executive branch,” said Robert Levy, a constitutional expert with the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, who attended the speech.

Ashcroft has mounted a public defense of the government’s response to the attacks, especially the Patriot Act. The law, enacted weeks after the attacks, expanded government surveillance capabilities, toughened criminal penalties for terrorists and allowed greater sharing of intelligence information.

Ashcroft is trying to counter the effort to scale back the law by critics, both Democrat and Republican, who believe it was rushed through while the country was in a panic after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The attorney general said Saturday that the law gave courts oversight to ensure that powers were not abused and that the administration welcomed a “bright light of inquiry” on the issues.

Ashcroft’s appearance came on the final day of the annual meeting of the society, a 21-year-old influential lawyers group with about 30,000 members.