When
@Ziggurat disputed the article, he presented essentially no evidence beyond his own personal belief that the article was not to be believed. When someone relies upon his own personal incredulity as the primary evidence for his argument, he invites a comparison between his own personal credibility and the credibility of sources he disputes.
Despite
@Ziggurat's disputation of the article, he here admits that almost everything said in the article is true.
The one thing
@Ziggurat actually disputes is the rather obvious conclusion to be drawn from the facts
@Ziggurat is now conceding: Trump isn't getting a full picture of the war, because Trump's character and mental disabilities (which
@Ziggurat does not dispute) have led his aides to give up on trying to get Trump to pay attention to written briefings, and are trying to keep him happy by showing him videos of things being blown up.
With respect to the blue part: Sources with first or second hand knowledge often speak off the record because they don't want to be identified. When there are only a few individuals who would have first hand knowledge, reporting that a source has first hand knowledge would go a long way toward identifying the source. The news article we're discussing does not claim its sources have first hand knowledge, nor does it claim its sources have second hand knowledge, but its prose relies upon the standard locutions that reporters use to avoid
ing outing an off-the-record source by saying the source has first or second hand knowledge.
@Ziggurat, it seems, would like to interpret the deliberate vagueness of those standard locutions as evidence the sources don't know what they're talking about. That is his prerogative. It is not a reason for others to share his conclusion that absence of evidence for first or second hand knowledge is evidence for absence of such knowledge.
With respect to the pink:
@Ziggurat is saying his personal estimation of the balance of probabilities is that the article's sources don't have first or second hand knowledge. That is his prerogative. It is not a reason for others to share his estimation of the balance of probabilities.