As for counselling the latter, he did not recommend al-Qaeda as a future career. He wrote: "Forgive me because I have given you only a little of my time since I answered the jihad call. I have shouldered the Muslims' concerns and their hardships, embitterment, betrayal and treachery." This was typical Osama-speak: grandiose, plangent and self-romanticising.
In the event, the will was not needed until May 2 this year, when bin Laden had his brief encounter with a US Navy Seal in his darkened Abbottabad home. Imagine his surprise that mass murder carried risks; a viewpoint, it seems, shared by the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Predictably, we are now hearing from bin Laden's ramified brood, risen to 24 in the interim decade – although we have heard little from the three widows the Navy Seals left in plastic cuffs, one of them wounded in the leg, and said by friends to have long wanted "to go down in history". Worryingly, the so-called "Crown Prince of Terror", Osama's 20-year-old son Hamza, is neither dead nor in detention. There are fears that he was being groomed as bin Laden's successor.
Even at the age of 16, Hamza appeared, imprecating dire threats against the West, in a video made for his older brother Mohamed's wedding. He read the verses: "Accelerate the destruction of America, Britain, France and Denmark. Oh God, reward the fighters hitting the infidels and defectors. God, be pleased with those who want to go for jihad – and blind those who are watching and want to capture them." It was this ditty which won him his Crown Prince nickname.
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