The cabbage

The show: JAG
The episode: "Bridging the Gulf," from Season 10.
What happened: Harm investigates an aviator from the USS Kennedy who authorized his gunner to immobilize an Iraqi fisherman's boat that was approaching an oil terminal. Harm concludes Lt. Gutierrez (Randy Lewis Hernandez) was correct to stop the boat, but he soon himself finds himself having to make a similar decision: while getting his F-18 quals, he's diverted to the oil terminal and shoots a Cessna out of the sky before that plane can strike the oil terminal. The plane Harm shot down then turns out to have had an Iraqi dignitary on board. Turner comes aboard to investigate and Harm is grounded but continues his investigation ashore, aided by Col. Najjar (Andrew Divoff) of the Iraqi Army, leading to a climactic shoot-out in which the Iraqi fisherman (Ahmed Ahmed) seems to die and the body of the real Iraqi minister is found in the terrorists' lair. Now cleared, Harm resumes his carrier quals, while Turner escorts the Iraqi fisherman to America to rejoin his family, who were taken over there to put them out of the terrorists' reach.
What doesn't quite make sense: As Turner gets ready to board the COD back to America, the fisherman feels compelled to explain to Turner why he's alive: in order to make sure that the terrorists wouldn't menace the man's family as they made their way out of Iraq, the terrorists had to be made to think that he had died and that therefore there was no reason to go after his family. However, this explanation is really intended for the viewers. I mean, why would Turner care if the fisherman was dead or alive? Turner's investigation was on Harm for blowing up the Cessna, not on Gutierrez for incapacitating the fishing boat. Did the fisherman come aboard the Kennedy prior to the wire operation, or did Turner go ashore at some point that we were not apprised of?
If there is a character who needed that explanation is Col. Najjar, who saw the apparent death of the fisherman and almost avenged him by killing a terrorist he irately described as "the son of a syphalitic whore" (with such badly spelled subtitles, we can only assume the spoken Arabic is not much better). Harm, who seems to have been aware of the strategy, has to make Najjar back down.
While we're on the subject of onscreen text, in the end credits, the actor Nabeel is identified as an "Iraqi soldienr." Actually, there is a character that looks like a lowercase "m" with part of the rightmost line erased to make it look like an "r." In fact that would have worked if you started out with an "n" rather than an "m." To make a mistake like that in Final Cut Pro would actually be an accomplishment, because, as far as I can tell, there is no such character in Unicode.
And another thing: According to the IMDb, an FA-18 can't fly at the same speed as a Cessna, at least not the way they're shown in this episode: Although a Cessna's maximum speed is close to an FA-18's stall speed, "the FA-18 is not flying nose high with flaps extended (to maintain minimum airspeed)." Assuming that's correct, shooting down the Cessna may have been the only thing Harm could possibly have done under the circumstances.
The IMDb also says that Turner's theory "that the Cessna was on autopilot and returned to it programmed destination after Harm tipped it off course" is invalidated by the fact that a Cessna's autopilot function is for a course, not a destination, and thus if it was possible for Harm to nudge the Cessna away from its destination, the Cessna should not have snapped back on course for the oil terminal.
On that last point I'm willing to be a little more forgiving, for after all, Turner is a submariner, not an aviator. It is understandable that he would not know the specifics of the Cessna autopilot, and it is also understandable that Harm, sullen over his career being in Turner's hands, would not volunteer to explain during the preliminary investigation that just the Cessna snapping back on target for the oil terminal was proof enough that it was intended to hit the terminal.
Lastly, if I recall correctly, there was one scene that the USS Kennedy was 47 and another that it was 72. If I'm right, this would mean that those establishing shots are of the real life USS Philippine Sea, CV-47 (decommissioned in 1958) and the real life USS Abraham Lincoln, CVN-72 (which is still in service). Don't worry, I didn't go to Wikipedia for those bits of information, I went to www.navy.mil.