After a little googleing I found a post. In this post the author explains that all you have to do in order to install the binutils on a 64-bit linux system is fool the system by typing "linux32" before your command. For example in this case it would be:
linux32 ./configure
linux32 make
linux32 make install
to build for a regular compiler and this:
linux32 ./configure --target=$TARGET --prefix="$PREFIX" --disable-nls
linux32 make
linux32 make install
to build for a cross-compiler.