I've figured it out and just in case someone else is forced to use ASP to process XML...
The code above WORKS on an XML document
on the server, but if you are like me and you're trying to read XML document from a
response stream the following code does the trick...
set xmlDoc = createObject("MSXML2.DOMDocument")
xmlDoc.async = False
xmlDoc.setProperty "ServerHTTPRequest", true
xmlDoc.load("http://somesite.com/api/xml?action=login&login=jon@doe.com&password=foobar")
response.write xmlDoc.selectSingleNode("//results/status").Attributes.GetNamedItem("code").Text
Cheers!