Could Batman Be Bat-Manipulating Again?

It occurred to me this afternoon that Batman could be the one who hired the Secret Six to pull off this little mission of theirs. Yeah, I know, slow on the uptake. Just let me go with this, for sanity's sake.

The person paying them is doing so anonymously. The anonymous client wants them to break Tarantula out of a meta-prison because she has something that is of great importance to the criminal underworld. Batman has Huntress contact Catman, specifically to warn them off the job. Not only that, she specifically tells him that Batman knows about the whole thing. And even though this call is ostensibly to warn someone she cares for of approaching danger, Huntress hates having done it. Seems a bit odd.

Except, the warning doesn't deter the Six in the slightest, and actually induces Catman to come to Gotham and square off with Batman, to tell him they don't scare. Once Catman arrives, Batman offers them double their fee if they walk away, which insults Catman a little bit. That's how you might deal with some common criminal, who truly only cares about the money, and Blake is looking to be something more. Batman says that if they do this job, he will shut down their operation permanently. But when Catman immediately replies that they've already begun, what does Batman do? Does he pull out all the stops to defeat Catman and send him to jail? Does he call the JLA (or hell, the Outsiders) and tell them to haul butt to Alcatraz and stop the prisoner abduction? No, he continues his sparring and chit-chat with Catman. Hardly jibes with his earlier statement. Batman says he never bought Blake as a joke, even when everyone else did.

The Six seem to be a contrary sort. The more you tell them they can't do something, the more likely they are to do it. They either wanted no part of "Luthor's" Society, or weren't invited, and rather than run and hide, they decided to instead try and destroy the Society first. It's fairly likely Batman would know this, and that he might see a way to use it. I'm not saying he wants the Six to kill these various criminal scumbags that are going to come after them, but he might see it as a way to get those scumbags out of whatever hidey-holes they stay in, where they can be brought down.

At the end of #1, Batman said no one would be getting out of this with clean hands. He emphasizes especially Thomas Blake, but since he said no one would come out of this clean, that means him as well, doesn't it?

The other possibility I see is that Batman is testing Blake to see if Huntress is right about him. He's placed him in a difficult situation, where his team freed this woman from prison, but are supposedly turning her over to someone who will kill her once they get this "card". Plus, lots and lots of people will be trying to kill him and his group to get at her. So now we see how Blake responds. Which worries me for Catman's moral crisis*, if he makes the "right" choice, but finds out he was being jerked around the whole time, and even if he had made the wrong choice, the Justice League would have shown up and stopped him or something. Though that could lead to an interesting tailspin for him. Not a pretty one (if there is such a thing), but likely entertaining.

* And it has to be a crisis doesn't it, what with this being DC and all.