nlapiRequestURL response body format

Hi,

I am trying to make a web service call from a suitelet.  I am using the nlapiRequestURL call which is getting a valid response.  My problem is that the response.getBody() result does not maintain the soap XML format.  The Element values are returned in a single string.  I am doing the following:

var a = {};
a['Content-Type'] = 'text/xml;charset=UTF-8';
a['Content-Length'] = soap_request.length + '';
a['Accept-Encoding'] = 'gzip,deflate';
a['SOAPAction'] = 'login';
a['Host'] = 'webservices.netsuite.com';

var soap_request = "A well formed soap request";

var response = nlapiRequestURL('https://webservices.netsuite.com/services/NetSuitePort_2009_2', soap_request, a);