A pastor “Under Siege”

REVEREND JIM Moats, a resident of the small town of Newville, Pa., had such a great life story that it could have been a movie.

Actually, it was.

Newville has been exposed as a giant liar after he boasted in a recent profile in a local paper of his days as a Navy SEAL following the assassination of Osama bin Laden by a team of SEALs. According to the profile:

When he learned of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, the Rev. Jim Moats almost got out his old Navy SEAL flag to run up the pole in front of his home in Newville.

Moats was a Navy SEAL four decades ago during the war in Vietnam.

Now 59, Moats was a brash athletic 19-year-old from a military family in northern Virginia, who enlisted in 1970...

Moats underwent SEAL training at Little Creek Amphibious Base in Virginia Beach in summer 1971.

Instructors hit SEALs and goaded them to quit. He was subjected to waterboarding, because the Navy knew that's what the Vietnamese did to SEALs and air crew members who were captured.

SEALs were kept going for days with little sleep. The instructors would lie, promising sleep or a break, but when the time came it wouldn't happen.

Moats grew accustomed to the physical part because he was in good shape. The mental barrages were more grueling.

"I had almost no discipline. I was as wild as they came. That was my nemesis," Moats said. "They weren't looking for a guy who brags to everyone he is a SEAL. They wanted somebody who was ready but had an inner confidence and didn't have a braggadocio attitude."

Moats has been telling the same story to his congregation for five years.

It was a nice story--too bad Rev. Moats made it all up.

One day after the glowing profile of the conservative graduate of Bob Jones University, it was revealed that Moats had never been a Navy SEAL, he never underwent training, nor had he ever been waterboarded. He did serve on a Navy ship during the Vietnam war, but never set foot in the country.

According to Don Shipley, the retired SEAL who proved Moats had never been a member "Moats' story about being re-assigned to kitchen duty and about being waterboarded were lifted from the Steven Seagal movie Under Siege, while his reference to being hit by SEAL instructors was vintage GI Jane."

The 1992 cult "classic" Under Siege, of course, stars Steven Seagal as a former SEAL-turned-cook who becomes the only person who can stop a gang of mercenaries when they take over a U.S. Navy battleship. Movie critic Roger Ebert called it "Die Hard goes to sea."

Sadly, Moats' lies have proven slightly less entertaining than the film--and he's since apologized for allowing "people to assume" he was in the SEALS for five years. (No explanation came for why Moats wore a gold Trident medal publicly--a medal reserved for those who have completed SEALs training.)

Shipley added, "We deal with these guys all the time, especially the clergy. It's amazing how many of the clergy are involved in those lies to build that flock up."