Restricted to quarters means what exactly?

The show: JAG
The episode: "Back in the Saddle," from Season 9, in which Harm's return to JAG is prepared with the arrest of Commander Imes (Dana Sparks), who was supposed to replace him.
What happened: Imes has just begun with her opening statements in the case of some enlisted sailor when military policemen burst into the courtroom and arrest her. Turns out that she exploited a loophole in the law in order to practice law without having passed the bar exam. Chegwidden assigns Mac to defend Imes, who Chegwidden says is "restricted to quarters" at the Anacostia barracks. Mac goes to Anacostia to discuss the case with Imes as they take a scenic walk through the barracks. Meanwhile, Harm is fired from the CIA because in the previous episode he was filmed by a news crew completing a CIA mission. He takes up crop dusting until getting an offer from Chegwidden to have his commission reinstated.
What's wrong with that: If Imes can freely walk the base, then Chegwidden was mistaken in saying that she was restricted to quarters. I don't know if I need to tell you that "quarters" is Navy lingo for someone's room on base or aboard a ship. In the case of an officer ranking high enough, I suppose "quarters" could be used to refer to an entire house on the base.
Now, if Mac ranked higher than Imes (which she doesn't, in this episode), she could tell Imes to take a walk with her. But then, which officer restricted Imes to quarters in the first place? If that was Chegwidden, then Mac unrestricting Imes would mean that Mac is overriding an order from an Admiral. If we're to understand that Imes went straight back to her quarters after her talk with Mac, some laid-back officer might say no harm done. But does Mac strike you as a laid-back officer? Or as more of a by-the-book hard-nosed type? The talk should have taken place in Imes's quarters. Maybe the director was worrying that setting the scene in someone's quarters would make the episode feel too claustrophobic (or at least Mac's plot strand, because Harm's plot strand involves flying a biplane over wide open fields). Or maybe he didn't want to go through the trouble of dressing a set for use as an officer's quarters, given that Imes will be out of the Navy, and presumably the show, after this episode (but such a set could easily been reused for another officer's quarters with some clever redressing). Whatever the reason, the fix is simple: they could've just had Chegwidden say Imes is restricted to barracks rather than to quarters.
And another thing: Doesn't Harm seem just a tiny bit paranoid in assuming that his getting fired from the CIA was Webb's idea? Surely Harm knows how important secrecy is to the CIA, given that he participated in the Angelshark inquiry (in Season 8), and he understands that being plastered all over the news is not conducive to secrecy.