Is the attorney general apologizing for saying the purged U.S. attorneys were canned for "performance-related reasons"?

As I mentioned earlier, that's what McClatchy reported yesterday, and the AP has a similar report today on what transpired during a conference call between Gonzales and all the U.S. attorneys on Friday:

During the conference call, planned as a pep talk to raise morale at a Justice Department tainted by the firings and the FBI's misuse of the Patriot Act, Gonzales apologized for how the dismissals were handled and for suggesting there were problems with the prosecutors' job performances.

Without more information, it's hard to know what that means. Is he abandoning the Administration's defense that the prosecutors were removed for legitimate job performance reasons? Or is he saying that the Justice Department did act based on performance concerns but shouldn't have shredded the prosecutors' reputations in the process of defending the move? Since this was a "pep talk," I suspect it's the latter.