1) White House notified of possible Bin Laden location
2) Calling in all available aircraft
Shortly after that we dropped a Daisy Cutter on Tora Bora. It was a very exciting evening. Then came news of the bogus "cease fire". I think we got him that night.
That would square with the results and the confusion. If a Daisy Cutter hit near where OBL was, there wouldn't be much left of OBL, so our DNA search would find nothing and the Al Qaeda people wouldn't know at that point whether he had perished or had gotten away.
I just checked via Google, a Daisy Cutter was dropped on December 9th. This is starting to add up . . . if so, great job by the Air Force and the other armed services.