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Just months ago, when General Motors was fighting for its life, CEO Mary Barra sounded every bit the reformer. She said that GM has "civic responsibilities," not just legal ones, that GM would "do the right thing" for customers and be "fully transparent."

Despite these pledges of openness, GM is starting to sound as if it is taking cues from former first lady Nancy Reagan's anti-drug playbook: "Just say no."

At a Senate hearing last week, Barra and GM's top lawyer used "no" more often than you'd expect from leaders asserting that GM has made a clean break from the company that left a defective ignition switch in cars for a decade, killing at least 13 people.

On several issues in which senators sought agreement, they got just the opposite:

No, GM will not unseal confidential settlements reached with families of victims who died in cars with faulty switches. Those settlements, said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., "could have saved lives" had they been made public earlier.

No, GM will not release documents and interviews that were part of an internal investigation by a handpicked former prosecutor. The report, released last month, slammed GM for a string of failures but helpfully cleared Barra and concluded that the company did not conspire to cover up the Cobalt's deadly defect.

No, GM will not waive a shield against lawsuits won in its 2009 bankruptcy reorganization, which provides immunity for pre-2009 sales of millions of defective cars.

No, GM will not support making executives criminally culpable when they hide a defect that kills or injures.

And no, GM won't dismiss the lawyer who ran the legal department that secretly settled Cobalt claims and says he was unaware of the car's deadly problem until this year.

All this negativity threatens to undermine the careful path Barra has since charted for GM after the scandal exploded in February.

She ordered the internal investigation, which was not the whitewash many critics predicted. She created a fund, with no cap, to compensate victims. GM has recalled a stunning 26 million vehicles, including nearly 718,000 more on Wednesday, and named an executive to take charge of safety issues.

These are all good moves. But new and troubling revelations suggest the work of fixing GM is far from done, and the company can't simply ride out the storm amid remarkably stable sales.

Last month, for example, GM recalled 7.6 million more vehicles for ignition switch failures similar to those in the Cobalt. GM said it is aware of eight injuries and three deaths in these models.

Also, last week, The New York Times reported that GM repeatedly dodged safety regulators' inquiries about fatal crashes involving the vehicles in which airbags failed. This raises fresh questions about what executives knew, and when they knew it.

For Barra, a GM "lifer" who became CEO just weeks before the Cobalt scandal broke, the debacle is an opportunity to get everything out and begin a new era. It's too bad she seems to be settling for so much less.

USA TODAY's editorial opinions are decided by its Editorial Board, separate from the news staff. Most editorials are coupled with an opposing view — a unique USA TODAY feature.