"When Osama bin Laden says he's going to attack the United States and he's focused on attacking us in the homeland, we should take him very, very seriously," Rep. Pete Hoekstra, chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence told ABC's This Week.

His counterpart on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., said he knew of "no specific threat that is tied to (bin Laden)" at the moment, but he added that he thought the message was "important."

"If you take that line that he said 'We are preparing every minute and every minute and when we're ready we're going to attack you in your homeland,' I think we have to take that very seriously," he told CBS' Face the Nation.

Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., the senior-most Democrat on Hoekstra's committee wrote this weekend to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, calling on him to consider raising the national color-coded threat level in key cities.

"I would like to discuss with you whether it is prudent to raise our state of alert in certain parts of the country including Los Angeles," read the letter, portions of which were shared with United Press International.

Last week, White House officials said there was no specific intelligence of any threat and no plans to raise the alert level.

Harman said she had been in touch with the FBI, the Port of Los Angeles and the Coast Guard about the security situation in the city, which was the target of the al-Qaida-linked millennium bomb plot and is routinely listed among the nation's top terror targets.

Appearing with Hoekstra on ABC, Harman said the bin Laden recording "to my mind, is quite scary."

In the tape, portions of which were broadcast Thursday by the al-Jazeera Arabic language news channel, bin Laden warned that the reason there had been no attack in the United States since Sept. 11, 2001 was "not because of (trouble) getting through your security."

"Operations are being prepared and you will see them when they are ready, God willing," he said. The CIA confirmed the voice was authentic, and a reference to a story carried in the British press about U.S. plans to target al-Jazeera's headquarters shows that it was recorded after Nov. 22 last year, analysts said.

Hoekstra said the message fit into a pattern.

"During the 1990s, (bin Laden) made these same kinds of threats and he actually attacked the United States and we ignored it and we paid the price on Sept. 11. We need to make sure that we don't make that same mistake again," he said.

Some analysts also contended that the release of the tape might portend an imminent attack, but others were skeptical.

"Warning your enemy before you attack him is very much a tradition in Islam," former CIA bin Laden unit chief Michael Scheuer told Fox news last week, saying the tradition dated back to the days of the prophet Mohammed and the wars in the Holy Land.

"When Saladin was fighting the Crusaders, he would warn them, he would offer them a truce, he would try to go the extra mile before attacking," Scheuer said.

Analyst Ben Venzke, who consults for government counter-terrorism agencies, said in a note for his intelcenter.com Web site that bin Laden uses the phrase, "Peace be upon those who follow guidance," a formulation that he has used only twice before -- in his peace offer to Europe in April 2004 and his last warning to the United States, in October that year.

The April message gave Europeans three months to respond to bin Laden's peace offer. Some analysts have said that planning for the London attacks of July 2005 began after that deadline lapsed.

Venzke concludes that the tape "is part of a warning cycle for Americans and is closely matching the pattern seen in the run-up to the July 2005 London bombings."

But author Peter Bergen, who has recently published a biography of the al-Qaida leader, told United Press International that it was basically impossible to try to divine the timing or pattern of forthcoming attacks from the messages.

"Before Sept. 11, bin Laden issued relatively few statements, and it is true that they often presaged attacks," he said.

"But since then the number (of statements) has increased dramatically. There have been 19 tapes of bin Laden alone. If you include (bin Laden deputy Ayman) al-Zawahiri, there have been 35 (audio or video releases). That's one every six weeks, almost. There haven't been that many attacks.

In a related development, ABC News terrorism analyst Alex Debat reported that the tape had been hand delivered to al Jazeera's Dubai bureau in the United Arab Emirates, "according to a senior Pakistani intelligence source."

Debat also reported new details of how bin Laden's voice and likeness made it onto TV.

The tapes, like bin Laden's operational directives "are hand carried from courier to courier in a long and intricate route that involves several dozen 'runners,'" writes Debat, who says the network was uncovered by "intense interrogation" of Abu Faraj al Libbi, an al-Qaida commander captured last year in Pakistan, but gave no indication of his source.

Debat said the system had defeated attempts to roll it up by Pakistani intelligence, because it involved "each courier hand delivering the tape or the written message to another courier or location without knowing the courier's identity, the origin of the tape or message or its destination."

The messages could take as long as 12 weeks to reach their destination, he said.

He said that the couriers, often moving on foot, were drawn in part from the networks of traveling Muslim preachers who roam the tribal areas that straddle the the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, where many believe bin Laden and al-Zawahri are hiding.

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