Hitchens burnt all his bridges with lefty liberal media for a variety of reasons, drinking, gerneral unpleasantness and so on. He got offered lots of dough to write for the other side and needed to cover his bar tabs some way.

Galloway I'm guessing has been backing the Assad regime recently but that's entirely consistent with old Arab nationalist view (which George and me both subscribe to). Assad may be a butcher but he's a sovereign butcher and the last thing the Arab world needs in western interference in another of their countries, so Arab nationaists reflexively back the guy not backed by America/west.