THAT was a low blow Robert Swift, the counsel for the 10,000 or so victims of torture who filed a class suit against Marcos, delivered the other day.

Romeo Capulong, the former lawyer of the National Democratic Front (during the 1986 peace talks) and Flor Contemplacion, he said, was ripping off the claimants.

Capulong and his Public Interest Law Center were never authorized by the US District Court to represent the plaintiffs.

Consequently, he has no business doing so. Yet he has been doing so, said Swift. And in quite an appalling way.

Capulong, the PILC and another organization, Selda (Samahan ng mga Ex-Detainees Laban sa Detensyon at para sa Amnestiya) have been soliciting money from the claimants.

While ostensibly offering their services for free, they have been pressing claimants for contributions.

I have heard of Swift's rift with Capulong and company in the course of prosecuting the class suit against Marcos, and my sympathies have in great part been with Swift.

I do think Swift did a good job with the case. I do think he deserves admiration, and at least compensation, for devoting a great deal of his time on the case, often with little hope of victory.

Getting the courts to find Marcos guilty of torture was one thing. Getting the Marcos estate to indemnify the torture victims was another.

The second meant a long and tortuous process of making depositions, proving the claims, and determining the liability of the Marcoses to each of the claimants.

A plain fortune-hunter might have given up on the case and moved on. There must be an easier way to make a living. My sympathies were completely with Swift when he complained about lack of cooperation from his allies.

He was the lead counsel in the case, he was the lawyer recognized by the American courts--to which the claimants had agreed to press their case.

He deserved to have been entrusted with the legal aspects of the case. It is called respect, it is called trust. Certainly, he deserved not to have found his path littered with all sorts of ideological and sectarian debris.

It was hard enough fighting the Marcoses, who maintained a formidable legal arsenal. But my sympathies are not at all with Swift in his current indictment of Capulong, PILC and Selda.

You may accuse Capulong of being ideological, you may accuse him of being impractical, but you may not accuse him of being venal. It is patently untrue. It is patently out of character.

The guy has had more opportunities to get rich, or at least to live a life where he does not constantly have to fear for his life, than most of us will ever do in several lifetimes.

A Ninoy ally and confidante in the United States, he was offered one of the top positions in Customs, an office known to spawn fortunes overnight, when he came home in 1986. He declined.

Instead, he agreed to lawyer for the National Democratic Front when it tried to negotiate a peace settlement with the Cory administration toward the end of that year. A perilous job, then and now.

To this day, he's still being called an NDF lawyer even though other lawyers are not called rapists because their clients have been proven to be so. Is that the type who's bound to take the money and run?

What's wrong with asking for contributions? The letter says explicitly the claimants are under no obligation to make them. That the PILC is still alive today is its own refutation of the charge of venality.

The only reward it abundantly offers is psychic, not financial. No foreign funder wants to touch the organization because of its politics. Yet it refuses to budge, preferring self-sacrifice to ideological capitulation.

You may not admire the politics, but you may at least admire the conviction. But which brings us to an even more important issue here. Which is that the class suit against Marcos is not just a legal one, it is also--indeed more so--a moral one.

Even worse than not recognizing Swift's legal ascendancy in the case is not recognizing Selda's moral ascendancy in the case.

I do not know that the legal side of the case itself would have prospered if not for the help of Selda and other groups. I was there at St. Joseph's College many years ago when a whole bunch of ex-detainees tried to recollect their ordeal in prison. Many of them did not want to be part of the suit. It had been everything they could do to try to forget the horrors of the past. If they went there, it was out of a sense of moral obligation.

The collective recollection didn't just make for accuracy, it made for fortification from the depredations of the mind. I cannot see how many of those depositions could have been made if the torture victims had only wanted to extract money from the Marcos estate.

Selda was there long before Swift and the other lawyers thought to bring the detainees' ordeal to the courts. And I am one of those who deeply resent the idea of Selda and other groups that had served the ex-detainees faithfully and well, long before they became a potentially profitable investment, being portrayed as having jumped into the Swift bandwagon at the first glimpse of opportunity.

Selda does have a moral ascendancy over the case. It deserves respect on that score. At the very least, it deserves not to have its motives questioned on grounds of profit. Selda's very existence too is its refutation of the charge of venality.

I do believe the torture victims ought to be restituted to the fullest extent possible. No amount can ever be too much, no amount can ever be enough. Never mind that many of them had had their capacity to work permanently impaired. Mind only that many of them had their capacity to live permanently impaired.

But the torture victims clearly deserve much more than that. In the end, the restitution may never be completely, or even largely, material. Raising the issue to the level of compensation does the torture victims well. Reducing the issue to little more than that does them ill. The issue is not just legal, or primarily so, it is moral, and above all so. I should think the spectacle of the ``comfort women,'' whose cause has been caricatured into a yen for yen, should have taught a bitter lesson there.

I had always hope Swift and Capulong would find their way to settling their differences. I still hope so, notwithstanding the cuts they have made on each other's sides.

The case is far more important than their individual egos or interests.

Enough of the recrimination, for the sake of the claimant.

I HAD a long talk with Etta Rosales and Gilda Narciso, who have been in the thick of the struggle to make the Marcoses pay for their sins. Etta is now the party-list representative of Bayan while Gilda is one of the officers of Claimants 1081, an organization representing victims of torture during martial law. Both have worked closely with Robert Swift to prosecute the class suit against the Marcoses. Swift is the American lawyer who won the case in Hawaii. Judge Manuel Real ruled that Marcos employed torture during martial law and should indemnify his victims through the estate he left behind. He has been working since to pry loose from the Marcoses the money with which to pay the victims.

It's not true at all, they say, that Romy Capulong, the legal adviser of the human rights group, Samahan ng mga Ex-detainee Laban sa Detensiyon at Amnestiya, and head of the legal organization, Public Interest Law Center, is the martyr in this story. If anyone is, it's Swift. It's not Swift who has been hounding Capulong, it's Capulong who has been hounding Swift. It's Capulong and his friends who have been calling Swift a lawyer for hire, one who gets into noble causes for not very noble reasons. Swift's accusation that it was Capulong who had been soliciting contributions from the claimants, which he let loose in a press conference some weeks ago, was a response to excessive provocation.

Indeed, say Etta and Gilda, a most unrelenting provocation. From the start, they say, Capulong and his friends put up all sorts of roadblocks in Swift's way, with a view to taking control of the case. Which was at least legally impossible since it was being tried in the United States and the US courts recognized only Swift as the lawyer there. Swift offered Capulong the job of local counterpart, but Capulong declined as he already had Jose Ma. Sison for a client. Later, Capulong applied for a legal personality in the case, but was rejected by Judge Real.

Why did the parties agree to file the case in the United States in the first place? The idea was Swift's, according to Etta and Gilda. He it was who first pointed out after the February Revolution that the thousands of political prisoners during martial law who were finally able to come forth and tell their stories could sue Marcos for their ordeal--and win it. The victory would not just be a financial one, it would be a moral one. It would establish Marcos's guilt and set a precedent for the prosecution of other tyrants. Everyone agreed that it would be hard, if at all possible, to prosecute such a case in the Philippines, given that local courts were prey to politics and blandishment.

Swift himself spent for the case, though of course he expected to be remunerated for his services if and when he won it. Gilda was originally a member of long standing of Selda, and she recalled how when they went to the United States to meet with Swift--their fare paid for by him--she at first distrusted him, given the bad press about him she had gotten from Selda leaders. It was only later, after she got to know Swift better, that she came to trust him. Swift is sincere, swear Gilda and Etta. The very nature of his engagements--the class suit filed by the Holocaust victims, the Union Carbide mass poisoning in Bhopal, and the class suit against Marcos--proclaim him to be someone who's not just there for the money.

Listening to the stories of the torture victims has only deepened his conviction to see their case through to the end. In fact, it was that experience--he did his own interviews in the Visayas and Mindanao--that led him to file a similar class suit on behalf of the Holocaust victims. That one was more difficult, since nearly everyone involved in the case was dead, but surprisingly it took only a couple of years to wrap up. Which was so because everyone pulled in behind the effort.

Swift may not be a human rights lawyer, say Etta and Gilda, but there is no doubting the humanity of the man. Indeed, there is no doubting his stature as one of the leading legal lights in class suits against political repression.

I still think it was unfortunate that Swift chose to accuse Capulong of undue solicitation, despite the vexation to the spirit he had endured. Venality is not Capulong's weak spot. But that apart, and notwithstanding that I still regard Capulong as one of the most principled persons on earth, I must say that I find Etta's and Gilda's version of life believable. And I am sorry that in defending Capulong's integrity, I suggested that there might be something wrong with Swift's and Rod Domingo's.

I still wish that the two groups would find a way to forge some kind of modus vivendi in the disposition of the money, since actual cooperation seems virtually out of the question. Which is really to say that I still wish Capulong and Selda would find it in their hearts to recognize Swift's and Domingo's contribution to the case, and work with them rather than against them. I do believe that the case against Marcos should go beyond the merely legal and financial to the ethical and moral. But I no longer believe that what Swift and Domingo are doing is an impediment to that.

In fact, I now agree with Etta: What Swift and Domingo have done--doubtless with the help of Selda, the Claimants 1081, and other groups that have helped to draw out the victims and make them tell their stories--is something to be proud of. It is not something to knock down, it is something to raise up to heaven. Like Edsa itself, it is a contribution to making the world a better place to live in. Of course Swift and Domingo worked only at the legal and financial aspects of the case. That was what they were hired to do.

But that doesn't mean the ethical and moral concerns can't be pushed from there. That is where the other groups, by working along rather than at cross-purposes with Swift and Domingo, can come in. They can turn what Swift and Domingo have done into an ethical and moral victory as well, by making it a landmark case the world will remember.

There is only one way the National Democratic Front may put its imprint on this case. That is not by an act of assertion, which is what trying to insert the case into the peace process is. It is by an act of humility, which is what giving credit where credit is due is. There is much wisdom to be found in the New Testament as in Das Kapital. Particularly the part there that says the prideful will be humbled and the humble exalted.