Vlad and I worked very hard on this paper and submitted it to the Annals. The referees found the paper too hard to read, and we went on to prove the Surface Subgroup Theorem and the Ehrenpreis conjecture (for compact surfaces), so we eventually let this paper go. I still think it is a beautiful paper, and both Vlad and I went through it very carefully, so I feel quite sure that the result is correct.