Felix wrote:

it's not clear to me as an outside observer that they
wouldn't disappear people to keep their secret :)

   If "disappear" people would refer to the "1984"-like term of eliminating
people quietly, I *highly* doubt good ol' Jake and Chance would *ever* turn
to something that drastic.
   The Metallikats, who were the only ones to discover their secret in the
series and therefore the only canon source for this discussion, could not
be truly be "killed", and so they don't count (though I doubt Jake or
Chance would have had any problem letting them rot as scrap metal in the
hanger, programmed minds or no). As for non-canonical sources, in Strike's
"Pseudo" her villian character does find out (another one finds out in the
previous "Afraid of the Dark" but it good friends with Jake), and uses it
as blackmail to make the SWAT Kats go along with her. At first Jake, upon
hearing she knows their secret whilst they know hers (that of stealing
computer files), demands they turn her in anyway ("But she's still a
criminal, and that's what matters.") He probably wasn't thinking it through
at the time, but when the evil character realized the possibility of her
blackmail plot failing, she went even further to kidnap their friend to
make *sure* things went her way. In the end, she decided to ultimately keep
their secret safe for later use.
Dr. Jake Clawson
(djclawson@garden.net)(XXRJ13C@prodigy.com)
President of the SWAT Kat Club on Prodigy 
Check out my SWAT Kat Fan Fiction Archive!
   http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/8850/fanfic.htm
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         "Accidents are conspiracies we don't know about"
                             - anonymous
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