U.S. Jets May Seal Off Haiti : Embargo: Clinton considers dispatching military aircraft to enforce tougher U.N. sanctions. He approves offshore asylum hearings for some refugees.

President Clinton is considering the use of U.S. military aircraft to enforce a U.N. embargo on flights in and out of Haiti, including forcing down planes suspected of carrying supporters of the island nation’s military regime, officials said Saturday.

The move is one of several that Clinton is contemplating to make the U.N. embargo effective and concentrate its impact on the Haitian regime, which the United States wants to push from power, officials said.

At the same time, responding to protests from supporters of exiled Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Clinton has decided to provide offshore hearings to Haitian refugees who ask for political asylum in the United States, officials said.

The President does not intend to change the basic policy of intercepting Haitian refugees at sea and returning them home without allowing them to land in the United States, the officials said. But he has decided that “adjudication in third countries or on ships will be provided within a few weeks,” a White House official said.

Clinton met for more than two hours Saturday with his top foreign policy advisers, including Defense Secretary William J. Perry and Gen. John M. Shalikashvili, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to discuss his options in Haiti, where the brutal regime has ignored U.S. pleas to step down.

“He made several decisions” and may announce them as early as today, an aide said.

Clinton has tried several approaches to force the military from power and restore Aristide, Haiti’s first popularly elected president.

For almost a year, the United Nations has imposed an oil embargo on the impoverished nation, but it failed to keep oil out--or to impress the military. For several months, the Administration tried to broker a compromise between Aristide and the military, but that approach failed too.

Now the Administration has won U.N. approval for tougher sanctions, including a near-total embargo on trade and transportation. And, in an apparent attempt to pressure the Haitian military further, Clinton has warned that he will consider U.S. military options if the sanctions fail.

But that suggestion has deeply divided the Administration. Perry has publicly dismissed the idea of a U.S. invasion of Haiti as half-baked, asking: “After we’ve done that, what is Act II?”

In the short term, however, the President is concentrating on ways to make the new sanctions work in a way the old ones never did--even though many experts doubt that is possible.

“The key thing is that we are convinced that we have the makings of an intensified, broadened sanctions regime that can achieve the objective we have set out,” a senior official said.

The new sanctions approved by the U.N. Security Council on Friday include an immediate ban on private flights in and out of Haiti.

Officials said members of the military and their wealthy supporters had used such flights to ferry supplies to the island. U.S. officials also charge that private planes have been used in illicit drug trade that is enriching the military rulers.

Administration officials said they have been looking at ways that U.S. military aircraft could enforce that ban, in part because they consider it a way to strike directly at the military and its backers.

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The broader trade sanctions are scheduled to take effect May 21 if the military regime does not step down before then.

Clinton and his aides discussed ways to help enforce the embargo, including increased aid to the Dominican Republic, which shares a land border with Haiti on the island of Hispaniola--and whose frontier is a major smuggling route.

Clinton has also decided to soften his controversial policy of returning refugees directly to Haiti--but without taking the politically unpopular step of allowing them to land in the United States.

Aristide and liberal Democrats in Congress have denounced the policy as racist, and activist Randall Robinson has been on a hunger strike in Washington for 26 days to protest it. Robinson said Saturday that he would end his fast if the United States provided the refugees a shelter somewhere and allowed them to make a case for asylum.

“The President did decide this morning on an adjustment,” a senior official said Saturday. “We are going to pursue two options: to provide hearings in a third country or countries, or aboard ships.”

He said no other countries have been approached to provide the hearing facilities. In the past, officials have proposed other Caribbean islands or Honduras as possible sites.

Clinton decided to make the change because officials estimated that about 5% of the refugees have a legitimate claim to refugee status, “and they are put at risk by being returned,” the official said. “We’re concerned that with increasing harassment and violence, that could get worse.

“This does not mean that people who go to sea will have a better chance of getting into the United States than those who apply in Haiti,” he added. “The great, great majority will still be returned to Haiti.”

The human rights group Amnesty International said last week that 139 of the Haitians returned by the United States have been arrested, but the State Department said most were held for less than 48 hours, and all have been released.

Aristide said he was skeptical about Clinton’s intentions.

“It’s already 30 months (that) I’ve been hearing beautiful statements,” he said, referring to the time since the military overthrew him in 1991.