I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody...
"We cannot and will not negotiate with al Qaeda," White House front man Jay Carney said, adding that officials were greatly concerned for the safety of the aid worker Warren Weinstein, and were working to find him.
Earlier, the elderly Weinstein appeared in an al Qaeda video for the first time since he was kidnapped in Pakistain just days before he meant to return home last August.
The two minute, 40 second video was posted on jihadist forums by al Qaeda's media arm as-Sahab on Sunday, according to the US monitoring service SITE.
Dressed in a traditional Pak tunic and speaking impassively in English, he urged US President Barack Obama to respond to his kidnappers' demands.
"If you accept the demands, I live; if you don't accept the demands, then I die," he told Obama in the video.
Weinstein, 70, suffers from asthma, heart problems and high blood pressure.
Ayman al-
Zawahiri... Formerly second in command of al-Qaeda, now the head cheese, occasionally described as
the real brains of the outfit.Formerly the Mister Big of Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Bumped off Abdullah Azzam with a car boom in the course of one of their little disputes. Is thought to have composed bin Laden's fatwa entitled World Islamic Front Against Jews and Crusaders. Currently residing in the North Wazoo area. That is not a horn growing from the middle of his forehead, but a prayer bump, attesting to how devout he is...
has demanded that Washington end air strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistain, Somalia and Yemen, and release the 1993 World Trade Centre bombers along with relatives of the late Osama bin Laden
... who had a brief but splitting headache...
.