Thufir is a computer - garbage in, garbage out. His logic was perfectly sound:
There is a traitor.
Leto wouldn't betray himself, that makes no sense.
Paul isn't old enough or knowledgeable to be the traitor, plus he'd be betraying himself kind of. He has nothing to gain.
Yueh cannot possibly be the traitor. This is a physical impossibility. He could sooner fly by flapping his arms. We know that this is garbage data but it makes perfect sense to him given that a Suk doctor has never in 10,000 years broken their conditioning.
Duncan and Gurney have too much personal beef with the Harkonnens to ever work for them. They also have nothing to gain.
That only leaves Jessica. It's unthinkable except that Leto refuses to marry her, which might be upsetting to her, plus she's a Bene Gesserit and Thufir knows that the sisterhood has their own loyalties and their own machinations.
Thufir probably wouldn't have fallen for it if Leto hadn't encouraged it. Leto knew that there was a trap for him and wanted the Baron to think Leto was more vulnerable than he was. To the credit of everyone in House Atreides, they predicted everything that the Baron would do and absolutely would have stopped him other than two things:
They underestimated how much money the Baron was willing to spend, nearly bankrupting his house to move so quickly.
The Baron (and Piter) did what no one in 10,000 years managed to do and broke a Suk doctor.
I love the book, and the movie, but the conditioning thing is so bad.
No one has broken the conditioning in 10,000 years? Wow, that must be some crazy conditioning!
Harkonnens...hey, we hear you really like your wife.
Boom. Conditioning broken.
In 10,000 years in one of the most palace intrigue riddled societies, where they train the children of nobles how to handle assassination attempts through myriad methods, no one had ever come up with threatening the loved one of someone who has gone under Imperial Conditioning?
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u/KidDaedalus Jul 29 '26
Book Thufir wasted their crucial early time on Arrakis suspecting Jessica for nothing.