Is there a way to use LWP:Simple to get the source of an XML document without the XSL transformation.

I doubt LWP::Simple has anything to do with XSL translation of some XML document loaded by a webserver.

if I got to the site and hit view source I can see the XML with no problem

My intuition is that the webserver is detecting the browser "agent" string and has determined that your browser (LWP::Simple) can't apply the stylesheet itself, so the webserver is doing the translation server-side for you.

Try using LWP::UserAgent and:

$ua->agent('Mozilla/5.0');

$ua->agent('Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/2006120418 Firefox/2.0.0.1');

Update: fixed agent string, thanks Gangabass.

-David