Excuse me, but you're well off base. The specificity that was being objected to was not that it was an "intercept" nor that it came from the NSA. Nor, probably, even the gist of their meaning.
Instead, it was the leaking of the actual verbatim translations. Consequently, the people who were intercepted now know they were intercepted, along with where and how.
And that, my friend, is a flagrant breach of secrecy. A busted source...