When an absolute URI is substituted [redirect], mod_rewrite tries to escape the query string even if it was unchanged by the substitution. But the internal form (r->args) was never unescaped, so if the user did not substitute a query string this should act as if [NE] was present.
http://svn.apache.org/viewvc?rev=1044673&view=rev
fixed in 2.4.1