You've Got to Be Kidding Me

In the many articles about the death of Osama bin Laden, I guess there was bound to be an Unintended Pun. But did it have to be so morbid? 
Click here for the article.

May 3, 2011
Phone call by Kuwaiti courier led to bin Laden, By ADAM GOLDMAN and MATT APUZZO, Associated Press: “The revelation that intelligence gleaned from the CIA's so-called black sites helped kill bin Laden was seen as vindication for many intelligence officials who have been repeatedly investigated and criticized for their involvement in a program that involved the harshest interrogation methods in U.S. history.
'We got beat up for it, but those efforts led to this great day,' said Marty Martin, a retired CIA officer who for years led the hunt for bin Laden.”

I think Marty Martin wanted to indicate that the press and the American public had given the CIA a hard time for their methods, and I'll grant that as a retired CIA officer, he probably tends to use "tough talk" a lot. But in this case, couldn't he have picked one of the dozens of other ways to say it? Maybe "we got a lot of bad press" or "we felt like we were the enemy all those years" or something that didn't evoke the very thing he and the CIA were being accused of? But I think this is a classic case of his brain choosing words that were almost unavoidable given the association web of the context.