why is sudo doing this?

["Sancho2k Lists" <lists@sancho2k.net>]

Greetz!

As the following string illustrates, I can run certain commands as the
root user on my system but am having trouble with certain others.  My
user sancho is in the wheel group which is given the following line in
/etc/sudoers:

# Uncomment to allow people in group wheel to run all commands
%wheel  ALL=(ALL)       ALL

However,

sancho@molodetz:/home/ftpupload$ sudo echo "hello"
hello
sancho@molodetz:/home/ftpupload$ sudo echo "" >/var/log/ftpd
bash: /var/log/ftpd: Permission denied
sancho@molodetz:/home/ftpupload$ sudo echo "" >/var/log/xferlog
bash: /var/log/xferlog: Permission denied

I am unable to write to these files; my thinking is that while sudoing,
as superuser, i should get no permission denied statements.  This is
after providing my password for the first (echo) command.
Ownership/modes on these files:

-rw-r-----  1 root    wheel   20175 Mar 21 11:53 ftpd
-rw-r-----  1 root    wheel  141219 Mar 21 16:26 xferlog

Anyone able to shed some light on why these commands are not working?

-- 
Darren